Red kite
species of bird
The red kite (Milvus milvus) is a bird of prey in the family Accipitridae, which also includes many other diurnal raptors such as eagles, buzzards, and harriers. The species currently breeds only in Europe, though it formerly also bred in West Asia and Northwest Africa. Historically, it was only resident in the milder parts of its range in Western Europe and Northwestern Africa, whereas all or most red kites in Northern mainland Europe wintered to the south and west, some also reaching western Asia, but an increasing number of northern birds now remain in that region year-round. Vagrants have reached north to Finland and south to Israel, Libya and the Gambia.
Etymology
The English word "kite" is from the Old English cyta which is of unknown origin. A kite is mentioned by Geoffrey Chaucer in his Knight's Tale. The early 15th century Hengwrt manuscript contains the lines: "Ther cam a kyte, whil þt they were so wrothe That bar awey the boon bitwix hem bothe." The first recorded use of the word kite for the human-operated aerial device dates from the 17th century.
Taxonomy
The red kite was described by the Swedish naturalist Carl Linnaeus in 1758 in the 10th edition of his Systema Naturae under the binomial name Falco milvus. The word milvus was the Latin name for the bird. In 1799 the French naturalist Bernard Germain de Lacépède moved the species to the genus Milvus creating the tautonym.
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Datasets, specimens, observations and peer-reviewed methods provide the appropriate test for the technical claims summarized here. The source revision retrieved here is dated Jul 4, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q156250. The Library of Congress control number is sh99011640. None of the 1 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1758 and 1799.
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This entry incorporates text from “Red kite” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.