These handsome gray-and-black raptors have a delicate, strongly curved bill that fits inside the snail shells to pull out the juicy prey inside. Our results emphasize the importance of spatial heterogeneity in presenting opportunities for subordinate predators to coexist in a landscape with important superpredators. The highly specialized Snail Kite flies on broad wings over tropical wetlands as it hunts large freshwater snails. Overall, our study demonstrates how landscape structure and superior predators shapes predation risk for subordinate predators. Nest survival declined with proximity to superpredator nesting sites. This diving behavior is simply an attempt to ward off potential threats to the nest and young. Kites, like many other birds, will dive at animals and people that venture too closely to their nests. Mississippi Kite selection was not related to food abundance but could be explained by the presence of superpredators (i.e., hawks and owls) selecting riparian woodland for their nests. Mississippi kites, at times, cause problems for unsuspecting individuals. Compared to random conditions, kites selected nest sites with high tree density and more closed canopy in the surrounding area. In this landscape, kites favored upland trees and shrubs, avoiding their more typical riparian forest association elsewhere in the species' range. All three species nested in trees in a grassland landscape. We assessed the importance of local and landscape vegetation, food abundance, and predation risk on nest site selection and nest survival in a subordinate raptor (Mississippi Kite Ictinia mississippiensis) nesting in proximity to two superpredators, Red-tailed hawk (Buteo jamaicensis) and Great horned owl (Bubo virginianus). This takes on added complexity when a predator is faced with the challenge of avoiding fellow predators. Selecting nesting habitat that minimizes predation risk but maximizes foraging success is one of the most important decisions in avian life history. caused stomach lesions in two first-year kites. Helminth prevalence was 27.7%, with trematodes and nematodes being most prevalent, 13.8% and 10.8% respectively (n 5 65). Two of 43 nestlings we examined during banding hosted larval Protocalliphora sp. Kites hosted the following helminths (nematodes: Dispharynx sp., Procyrnea sp., and an immature ascarid trematodes: Order Strigeatida cestodes: Taenia vexata acanthocephalan: Cen- trorhynchus spinosus), and two taxa of protozoans (Phylum Sporozoa: unidentified coccidia and Phylum Metamonada: Giardia sp.). Methods included screening excreta collected from nestling and adult kites and their nests and dissecting the alimentary canals of salvaged nestlings. We examined 60 live and 5 salvaged Swallow-tailed Kites (Elanoides forficatus) for gastrointestinal parasites. Endoparasites of raptors are rarely documented to cause pathogenecity.
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