Snail kites are common throughout Central and South America, but in the U.S., they’re found only in Florida. Even many Floridians don’t know that the Everglade snail kite exists, says author Hilary Flower — and if they do, they’re often not sure if it’s a snail or if it’s a bird. Flower, a Floridian herself, knows the Everglade snail kite better than most, and she tells the story of its unlikely survival in her new book The Kite and the Snail. Though the snail kite’s resourcefulness doesn’t let humans off the hook for conservation, she says, “I do find hope in the fact that wildlife can surprise us so much.”
Flower is an associate professor of environmental studies at Eckerd College. I edited our conversation for length and clarity.
MN: As you write, the Everglade snail kite is so perfectly adapted to eating native Florida apple snails that the curve of its bill matches the inner curve of the snail’s shell. So when the native snail declined in numbers due to wetland development, the kite was believed to be in trouble, too — which was true, but not the whole story. What really happened?
HF: When the Florida apple snail started declining in the early 2000s, after a couple of severe droughts, the Everglade snail kite was on extinction watch. In 2004, an invasive South American apple snail started to take off, and the snail kites started following the explosions of this snail around the state. The new snail can be five or six times larger than the native snail, so when the snail kites would grab them and try to fly off, they would drop them, or they would get them to a perch and then couldn’t get their bills far enough into the shell to extract the snail. They would sometimes work on a snail for an hour and then drop it.
MN: And so there was a worry that the invasive snail was going to be the last straw, right? That it was going to be a kind of decoy that would just sap the snail kites’ energy.
HF: Yes, there was. But what was happening was that the snail kites were adapting to this new snail in real time. I talked to a field scientist who said that over the course of just a couple of years, he watched them figure out how to reach further back and get the meat out of these bigger snails. And though they were used to foraging for snails on marsh vegetation, they figured out that the invasive snail loves this invasive aquatic plant called hydrilla. In Lake Toho, where the invasive snail first exploded, the snail kites started foraging for snails on these rafts of hydrilla in the deep part of the lake. They would stand on the hydrilla and get the snail meat out of the shells.
MN: And it took a while for many people to realize this, because they were looking for the Everglade snail kite in the Everglades, and it truly was declining in the Everglades, but it had set up shop in habitats that were quite a distance from the Everglades.
HF: Yes, they can now be found hundreds of miles from the Everglades. When I was starting this project, my first job was to find a snail kite, which I hadn’t seen in a decade. I live in Tampa, so normally I’d be driving several hours south to the Everglades, but to find them, I had to drive several hours north to Paynes Prairie Preserve State Park — and there they were.
MN: And how is the Everglade snail kite doing now?
HF: After the invasive snail took off, the snail kites continued to decline for several years, but by 2013 they were on the rise, and by 2017 their statewide population was back up to about 3,000 birds, where it had been at the beginning of the century. Since then, their numbers have been holding pretty steady.
MN: So you make very clear in your book that snail kites in Florida still face plenty of threats, and that not every species is as flexible as the snail kite. But this project did make you think differently about endangered species. Can you tell me a bit about that?
HF: While I was working on this project, I talked to the evolutionary biologists Rosemary and Peter Grant, and I asked them whether we could find any hope in wildlife’s ability to adapt. And they said, basically, not on any scale. The fate of wildlife is going to be decided by humans. But I do find hope in the fact that wildlife can surprise us so much. There’s so much we don’t know. I mentioned that the invasive snail explodes when there’s been a disturbance — well, the disturbance that caused them to explode on Lake Toho was a restoration project. Things can go worse than we expect, and things can go better than we expect. And sometimes the worst outcome can have a weird silver lining. The snail kite gives me some humility about how big the world is, and how much is going on at all times and interacting and producing different results, and how, in some ways, we’re just another kind of creature, muddling around on the planet.
MN: You’re saying there is some refuge to be found in uncertainty — that there are species we may assume are going to decline, but they can still surprise us, and we’re still in a conversation with them. They still have agency.
HF: They have agency. The landscape has a life of its own. If you’re playing a game and you think, “You know what? Our team’s gonna lose,” then in your mind, the game’s over. As an environmental studies professor, I’m always trying to tell my students that the game’s not over. That they should go give it their all. But there is so much bad news. And so the snail kites are a reminder that the ball is very much in play — that there are all kinds of other people out there, doing their best, and the animals are doing their best, too.
MN: What are you working on now?
HF: My current project is on the flamingo, so I’m having a lot of fun learning about a species that did get extirpated from Florida — to the point that we didn’t even put it on the endangered species list — and now it’s coming back. So here’s a species that’s saying, “Okay, you don’t think we’re native, but we’re foraging over here.” It’s another amazing animal that’s full of surprises. And I’m tagging along with people who are in the scrum, trying to find out how to help this bird. It’s a mess, and I guess I just find the mess invigorating and fascinating.
The residents of Oppdal, Norway, recently organized an “interspecies council,” and The Guardian has a firsthand report. In other more-than-human news, Nature profiled conservationist Anne Poelina, whose scientific publications name the Martuwarra Fitzroy River of Western Australia as their first author.
“Rather than treating Siri with respect because it impersonates a woman, we should demand that Siri stop impersonating a woman.” Cory Doctorow on the personhood of nature and the (un)personhood of chatbots.
What is conservation, anyway? Tara Sayuri Whitty of Conservation Realist has an excellent thread on the subject.
And while we’re asking deceptively simple questions, who does the work of conservation? The researchers of the Conservation Labor Project are trying to find out, and you can help by completing their survey. Tommy Serafinski of the Conservation and Science Podcast has an interview with CONLAB researchers Anwesha Dutta and Nick Harvey.
Finally, check out this fine new reporting by my colleagues at High Country News: the writers and editors of our Indigenous Affairs Desk gathered these illuminating reflections by tribal leaders after a year of Trump, and contributing writer Christine Peterson hiked into the Greater Yellowstone to document the damage done by DOGE.
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