Mississippi Kite in Winnipeg

Yes! There is a Mississippi Kite in Winnipeg. Two actually, nesting. The first nest in Canada by this species. There nest is expanding northward, very quickly actually. If you look on the BirdTrax I have on my blog, which shows the recent eBird activity, and you click on 'rarities', it will be Mississippi Kite, Mississippi Kite, Mississippi Kite, ect...

When I saw it, I kind of got really excited. "Mom, can we see the kite?" "Mom, we should contact someone to see exactly where the kite is!"
Then Christian Artuso made the blog post on the blog about it, and about how it was nesting. Then I got really excited and we contacted Christian and he agreed to take us to the nest. So in the afternoon we went and saw the magnificent bird. It is actually really funny, when I was obsessed with raptors, I saw in our birds of Canada book that Mississippi Kites are accidentals in Canada. I thought they were such cool looking birds, I said they were my favorite raptor, and now, there is one nesting right in our city!

Kites catch dragon flies on the wing, they catch them with there feet. The birds demonstrated this many times while we were there.

Mississippi Kite with dragon fly

The kite flying

 Here's a picture of it with a dragon fly in it's talons

Mississippi Kite

 And here is the nest of the kite, you can see a fluffy white ball sticking it's head up, that's the baby!

There was a conifer that was a favorite spot for the kites. They kept landing there week after week.

Mississippi Kite

Mississippi Kite in the tree

 Preening and scratching.

Mississippi Kite

Preening

 Chimney Swifts kept flying over while we were there, a Manitoba Lifer!

Chimney Swifts

I will post more picture in a couple weeks, I only have smaller versions of the pictures. Christian sent them over email so he had to make them smaller, he will give us a USB stick with the pictures next time we meet.