Meet the protector of the northshore’s elegant, fork-tailed, bug-eating hawk (2024)

In a poison ivy–filled thicket under loblolly pines, Jennifer Coulson bushwhacked to the base of the tree where swallow-tailed kites had built a nest. She rummaged through leaf litter to find a clump of black-and-white feathers.

“This is from a baby, because there’s no follicle there. It was still forming,” she said. “See how it’s got some blood on it?”

The culprit “was probably a great horned owl,” Coulson speculated.

Coulson, an avian ecologist and conservation biologist who serves as the president of the Orleans Audubon Society, was out in the woods near Slidell taking stock of kite nests. She’s a researcher who, for about 30 years, has been monitoring the bird’s population in Louisiana and across the Gulf South. She contributes to a regional census of the striking fork-tailed raptors. Whether nesting birds are present can be taken into consideration in the permitting process for new development.

As part of that process, she monitors 22 nests across Louisiana and Mississippi, which she locates with the help of a small army — somewhere between 50 and 70 people, she estimates — who text her updates whenever they see a swallow-tailed kite.

Monitoring kite nests does involve occasionally finding dead nestlings. But later that day, Coulson peered through her binoculars at a young bird that had recently left its nest, sitting on a branch waiting for its parents to bring it food.

“It’s so much better when they live,” she said.

She’s a staunch advocate for the birds, and her research has provided cutting-edge insights into their lives. She studies their migratory patterns using GPS trackers, following them during their annual, treacherous journey in the fall across the Gulf of Mexico. They fly for days at a time without rest and settle for the winter in the rainforests in Brazil. In the spring, they return to the shores of Lake Pontchartrain to breed.

To get a GPS tracker on a bird of prey, Coulson enlists some help. She cares for a great horned owl, Hamy, who was hit by a car. He is named after biologist Frederick Hamerstrom, who always had a rescue great horned owl on his porch.

“He loves to be petted,” she said. “And he’s my lure.”

She holds the owl on leash, near a kite nest, and the kites will swoop down, thinking the owl a threat, and dive bomb it.

“Hopefully, they don’t notice my net,” Coulson said. She’s set up fine, 40-foot-long nets on either side of the owl. Once caught, Coulson then quickly affixes a solar-powered GPS tracker to its back and releases the bird back into the wild.

A palpable fondness

Coulson's interest in the birds isn’t just academic. She has a fondness for them that’s palpable.

“So little was known about them,” she said. “But they’re social, too.”

Theavian ecologist and conservation biologist isinterested in the social life of birds. She currently has about 30 Harris’s hawks, raptors that are known to hunt collaboratively, in groups.She’s published a number of peer-reviewed articles detailing how they do so. She also hunts with the birds during rabbit season.

Swallow-tailed kites may not exactly hunt collaboratively, she said, but they do work in groups.

“If I’m watching kites from an airplane, I’ll be like, ‘Oh, that’s interesting, it’s hunting all by itself,’” she said. “Then three minutes later, the other birds, a half dozen or so of them — they join up. They were maybe three miles apart. One of them might have found something, like a bunch of bats, and they all converge.”

Her work requires not just a facility with animals, but with people too. The nests are often on private property. To observe them, she needs to make nice with homeowners who might be wary of letting an unknown birdwatcher on their property.

“I’ve had the cops come out,” she said, when she and her husband were looking at a bird and a resident mistook them for stalkers. “I’ve got to remember to always have my ID with me.”

'Aree! Aree! Aree!'

Coulson’s infectious curiosity about the inner lives of these birds appears to have, in at least some small way, contributed to a resurgence in their population. Their numbers have rebounded from a low point in the early 20th century due to poaching and timber felling.

People sometimes still kill the birds because they think they might pose a threat to their chickens. But the kites mainly feed on small rodents and insects, and, weighing only about a pound, don’t feed on chickens. (Killing a kite also happens to be illegal.) Coulson has convinced at least a handful of people to put down their firearms when the birds are around.

With her help, the birds’ global population may have reached between 15,000 and 25,000, according to an estimate fromKen Meyer, the executive director of the Avian Research and Conservation Institute. The birds still need protection, but can been seen across the Gulf South in the summer.

And after so much time spent among them, drama of the birds’ lives is legible to Coulson. She can identify the call of a nestling begging for food. She can tell the difference between adult birds screeching in flight to warn each other about a potential predator, and knows they’re expressing, as Coulson sees it, a kind of excitement at the successful fledging of a young bird.

“One of their displays they do when they’re celebrating,” she said. “I’ve seen up to six kites, all in a row, do these U-shaped dives.”

She imitated their calls: “Aree! Aree! Aree!” and identified them as a “happy display.”

As we watched, one of the birds inverted and did a barrel roll. It’s hard to say with much certainty whether the birds were actually happy — though they seemed to be.

Coulson, on the other hand, in the woods with her birds, clearly was.