The Story
I photographed this Snail Kite (Rostrhamus sociabilis) at the Nowen Bridge in Puerto Concordia, Meta, Colombia, in February 2021. Its dark, deeply hooked beak is an adaptation to its main food, large apple snails, and it flies slowly with its head pointed down while looking for them. The adult male is dark blue-gray, while the adult female has dark brown upperparts and heavily streaked pale underparts. Females average only about 3 percent larger than males. It is a gregarious bird of freshwater wetlands that forms large winter roosts and nests in a bush or on the ground.
I used a Canon R5 with the RF 800mm f/11 plus the RF 1.4x extender for this one, at 1/500 sec, f/16, ISO 3200. IUCN lists the Snail Kite as Least Concern.
©2021 Adam Rainoff Photographer
The bird
The Snail Kite (Rostrhamus sociabilis) belongs to the family Accipitridae (Hawks, Eagles, and Kites) in the eBird/Clements taxonomy.
Source: eBird.org (opens in a new tab)
Conservation
Least Concern on the IUCN Red List (assessment published 2020), with the population trend listed as stable. Source: IUCN Red List