The Return of Fish Bird

About ten years ago my husband and I were standing in our driveway one sunny afternoon, when a bird flew over our heads and started to circle.  It was about the size of a large seagull and mostly white, with dark grey, or black on the wings and tail,  a plump body and a split tail.  We live in a pretty rural area, so birds of prey are not at all uncommon, but we’d never seen one of these before and curiously, it seemed very interested in us, but not at all threatening. The split tail feathers really resembled a fin and Jim and I joked about how it looked like a fish.  We watched the bird for quite a while, before it lost interest in us and moved on.  When we went inside I tried to search the Audobon and other nature web sites dealing with birds in Florida, but since I had no idea what I might be searching for, there was really too much information to figure it out.  I used phrases like “fish bird” and “Florida bird resembles fish”, and I guess not everyone thought this bird looked like a fish and I didn’t find anything.

The bird came back a few times and we would yell, “Hi Fishbird!”, like idiots - but it didn’t matter much because our neighbors were all morons and were doing way worse things than talking to birds, although the woman who lived across the street was usually smoking crack, so who knows what she was talking to.  We moved from that house shortly thereafter and unfortunately fishbird didn’t follow us to our next home. There were hawks and very large owls there, so maybe fishbird was a little out of his fighting class.

We’ve moved quite a few times since then (read: gypsy who gets bored very easily), and have seen fishbirds more than a few times over the years and somehow this species (genus?) has started to occupy a part of our brains that elevates it to more than just a bird.  Fishbird has become more of a talisman, or a totem animal for us.  If we’re on a path and we happen to see fishbird we think it’s a sign.  Yes, we know we’re nuts, thank you.

The other day we were discussing our move and whether we were making the right decision on a particular house, while we floated around the pool.  It was a lazy sort of discussion and I was floating face up on a makeshift noodle raft, when a shadow passed over me.  I looked up and guess what I saw… c’mon I think you can guess.  That’s right.  Fishbird!  Only there were three of them.  Obviously a family teaching the smaller one to fly and probably catch bugs. Yum.  That sealed it for us, we were making the right decision.  As I was contemplating the birds and watching them teach their nestling to fly, I had an idea.  Don’t search for “Florida bird looks like fish”, search for “Florida bird forked tail” or “Florida bird split tail”.  I came inside and started my search and sure enough…  It’s a Swallow Tailed Kite and apparently a sighting is pretty rare.  I feel very lucky that I have been graced with dozens of sightings and it’s further embedded the notion into my brain, that it’s not “just a bird” (again, with the nuts, I know).

In my search I found lots of beautiful photographs, all of them copyrighted, so instead of posting them here, which wouldn’t be very nice, I’ll link to some of them. This one’s my favorite, but there’s also this and this and there’s also a great video on Youtube that has embedding disabled.

Remember the part in “Arthur” where Liza Minelli tells the story about how she always thought she was special because the moon followed her?  Yeah, that’s how I feel about fishbird.