Date: 6/24/26 8:55 am From: Kimball Garrett via groups.io <cyanolyca818...> Subject: [LACoBirds] A Pearl Kite (somehow) reaches California
Birders,
In a remarkable and perhaps educational episode of bad birding, I managed to pass off a potential first county, state, country, and ABA area record as an anomalous example of a common species, with this mistake only coming to light yesterday. On 12 Jun 2026 I was walking back to my car parked along Pearblossom Hwy (Hwy 138) in Littlerock (east of Palmdale in Los Angeles County) after birding the Little Rock Gravel Pits just west of where Little Rock Creek crosses Hwy 138. In the distance a small falcon-like bird was perched on a utility wire next to a Eurasian Collared-Dove. It struck me as an American Kestrel but was almost entirely white on the underparts and showed a broad white hindneck collar. I've seen very white American Kestrels in Cuba but not in mainland North America, so I figured it must be an odd leucistic individual. I snapped a quick photo of the perched bird with my little toy camera (Sony RX10), but before I could even put my spotting scope on it it took off and flew east over Little Rock Creek; I tried one more photo of it as it flew away with little confidence the bird would even be in the image. [In retrospect, I suspect the bird was spooked off by a Peregrine that had landed on a nearby utility pole; I'm pretty sure I didn't flush the bird since I was still quite far away.] I put the sighting (and crops of the two bad photos) in my eBird list, and even mentioned in my write-up that the unusual amount of white gave the bird a "Pearl Kite-like vibe." That was that until yesterday when the photos were flagged by an eBird photo reviewer as a Pearl Kite rather than a kestrel. That prompted me to look more closely at my photos, and indeed I could see a number of features that looked good for Pearl Kite and, importantly, I could really see nothing that suggested that the bird could have been a kestrel. I sent photos and a link to my eBird list to a few friends who are Neotropical bird experts, and got rapid and emphatic responses that the bird was indeed a Pearl Kite (thank you Van Remsen, Kevin Zimmer, Jon Dunn, and John Garrett).
I have looked casually for this bird a number of times as I have driven by the area, but with 12 days having passed and nothing obvious to hold such a bird in this area I have little confidence it will be seen again here. On the other hand, Pearl Kites feed largely on lizards, and there is no shortage of lizards (western whiptails, zebra-tailed lizards, yellow-backed spiny lizards, side-blotched lizards, etc.) in this area, There are tens of thousands of miles of utility wires in California, and those familiar with this species stress its tendency to sit on wires. So keep your eyes on roadside wires.
As for provenance, there will certainly be questions. This is one of several Neotropical bird species that have benefitted from deforestation and have expanded their ranges in response. I'm not aware of any reports north of Guatemala, but future ones in Mexico (and north?) seem likely. Who knows? I will inquire at the Midway Pet Store, which is just east of where I saw the bird, but chances seem slim that such a bird would be sold in pet stores (or that the owners would own up to it if they had, and lost, a Pearl Kite). Some may be concerned that the two poor pictures, without any detailed field notes written at the time of the sighting, may not be sufficient to support such an unprecedented record. I don't necessarily disagree, but can only repeat that my views were very quick and distant and I didn't have the luxury of studying the bird.
Had I been thinking, I would have put more weight on the Pearl Kite-like features of this bird and put the word out right away. Again, an example of bad birding. Last night I watched the YouTube video of the great talk Julian Hough gave recently to San Diego Field Ornithologists on the perils of "group think" in bird identification. Lots of good points, but in the present case the "group" consisted of all the ill-informed voices in my head rather than the thoughts of other birders.
