My wife and I have seen White-tailed kites several times on our
various birding excursions, but quite recently in southern Arizona and
in the Sacramento Valley of California. (I have also been a volunteer
bird bander, so am not a total loss at identification.) We saw a pair
of White-tailed kites about 1 mile south of Duvall, WA, along the
Snohomish river this spring (April?), and called the Washington Rare
Bird Alert hot-line, but I later got a message on my answering machine
dismissing our hawks as Northern harriers. We did not see those birds
again. Later into summer, early June I'd guess, my wife saw a single
White-tailed kite on highway 520 west of the I-405 interchange. She
saw this bird three days in a row, but having been brushed off by the
hot-line operator (and not knowing about the Internet or Tweeters yet)
we have let the kites slide (is this mixing a metaphor? Do kites
slide?). We both know very well the difference between a (bulky, our
word) harrier and a (graceful, almost falcon-like) kite. We have
added the kites to our Washington state list with confidence.

Bruce Helmboldt
bhelmboldt at seaao.dcmdw.dla.mil
Duvall, WA