![]() ![]() Mainly white underneath, it has black wingtips and shoulders. The coloration of the white-tailed kite is gull-like, but its shape and flight is falcon-like, with a rounded tail. caeruleus but is now regarded as separate again. caeruleus is once again called black-winged kite, while the name black-shouldered kite is now reserved for an Australian species, Elanus axillaris, which had also been lumped into E. This argument was accepted by the American Ornithologists' Union, so the white-tailed kite was returned to its original name. More recently it was argued that the white-tailed kite differed from the Old World species in size, shape, plumage, and behavior, and that these differences were sufficient to warrant full species status. įor some recent decades, it was lumped with the black-winged kite of Europe and Africa as Elanus caeruleus and was collectively called black-shouldered kite. ![]() The specific epithet leucurus is from the Ancient Greek leukouros for "white-tailed": leukos is "white" and oura is "tail". The word Elanus is from Ancient Greek elanos for a "kite". It is now one of four species in the genus Elanus which was introduced in 1809 by the French zoologist Jules-César Savigny. The white-tailed kite was described in 1818 by the French ornithologist Louis Jean Pierre Vieillot under the binomial name Milvus leucurus with the type locality as Paraguay. It replaces the related Old World black-winged kite in its native range. The white-tailed kite ( Elanus leucurus) is a small raptor found in western North America and parts of South America.
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