The Red Kite (Milvus milvus) is an elegant raptor with rich reddish-brown plumage and a deeply forked, scissor-like tail, one of Sweden's clearest conservation success stories: from under 50 breeding pairs, concentrated in Skåne, in the early 1970s, the population has rebuilt to roughly 4,500 pairs by 2018, a 427 percent increase over 20 years. It is a large but slender raptor, some 60–70 cm long with a wingspan of about 170–185 cm and a weight typically of 800–1,300 g. The body and rump are rust-red, the head pale greyish-white, and the long, narrow wings show pale "windows" near the tips in flight, but the surest mark is the deeply forked, rust-coloured tail, constantly twisted and used as a rudder during the species' characteristically light, buoyant soaring flight.
Its call is a somewhat mournful, drawn-out whistling "pjeeiii" followed by shorter, falling, trilling notes, heard mainly over breeding territories in spring and early summer. In Sweden the stronghold remains Skåne, though the species now also breeds in Halland, Blekinge, Småland, Västergötland, Öland, Gotland, and Östergötland; older birds are largely resident, while most juveniles migrate southwest, chiefly to France. It builds a large stick nest high in a deciduous tree, often decorated with scraps of litter and cloth, and reuses the same site year after year; the female lays 2–3 eggs, usually in April, incubated about 30 days, with chicks fledging at 45–50 days in early July. Its diet is broad and opportunistic — mainly birds, especially nestling and recently fledged corvids such as jackdaws, crows, and magpies, plus species like Woodpigeon and Northern Lapwing, alongside small mammals, rabbits, roadkill, and carrion, with fish taken near lakes — and it readily follows tractors during haymaking and harvest, hunting low over fields and roads; winter feeding stations, where kites gather in numbers, have contributed to the species' recovery.
Read about this species in Swedish →