We have these birds that soar the sky around our house. I've wondered all this time what they are. They aren't hawks, of that I was certain. Could they be eagles? I couldn't find anything to compare them to on the Internet, except for a few mp3s of eagles' cries. These birds sound pretty similar to what I heard, so I decided they must be a type of eagle indigenous to the area, which delighted me. We don't have eagles in the Illinois flatlands, where I come from.
My husband thought they were small for eagles. And a recent close-up view of a circling bird showed that the tail was not straight across, as an eagle's tail feathers should be, but scooped in the middle. I finally had to admit that the birds were not eagles.
Last week, I ran into a neighbor who was cutting his lawn with a scythe. He doesn't really have a lawn, per se, if you define a lawn as having an expanse of smooth green grass soft enough to walk barefoot on. Neither do we, for that matter. Instead, his yard is typically hip-deep in weeds of varying types. Our co-neighbors, an old couple in their 80s who keep a very large vegetable garden and chicken coop to sustain themselves, had recently complained to him about his weeds infesting their garden with baby weeds. So he was out in his yard the next day with a scythe, the only tool that not only would cut it all down, but that would fit through the opening to his yard and could be carried up the hill to do the work.
My next-door neighbor, coincidently, is American who hails from Maine. He's been in Germany for 20 years or so. Came here while he was in the Navy, and stayed to work. We don't run into each other often, but our chats sometimes run long when we do. I remembered, during the course of this one, to ask him what those eagle-like birds are.
"I don't know," he said in his distinctive Maine accent. "I only know the German word for them, which someone told me when I asked a few years back. They're called, Milan."
And that was exactly the information I needed to find out what name I might know them by. A quick reverse-search on the Internet--I googled Milan on the german google.de to find out the latin name then English-googled the latin name to find out the common name in English--revealed that these birds are Red Kites.
And to my gratification, they are related to Hawks and Eagles. So I wasn't so far off the mark as I might have been!
