Cuban Kite Chondrohierax wilsonii Scientific name definitions

This extremely poorly known cousin of the widespread Neotropical raptor, the Hook-billed Kite (Chondrohierax uncinatus), is confined to the island of Cuba, as its name suggests. Formerly considerably more widespread than it is today, with records from as far west as the savannas of Cienfuegos and the Ciénaga de Zapata in the mid-19th century, nevertheless the species seems to have been always rare, and since at least the early part of the 20th century the Cuban Kite has been confined to the far east of Cuba, in the provinces of Holguín and Guantánamo. There are growing concerns that the species may now be extinct, if not actually so, at least functionally, given scarcely ten reports, most of them undocumented (but many involving experienced observers) from the Cuban Revolution down to the present, with none since the end of the first decade of the 21st century. The decline is believed to have been hastened by habitat loss and fragmentation, the harvesting of tree snails upon which the species apparently depends for food, and indiscriminate hunting; however, virtually nothing is known of the species’ ecology, so some of these causal factors represent little more than educated surmise, which unquestionably hampers efforts to conserve this imperiled kite.

Named by the American ornithologist, John Cassin, in the late 1840s, the Cuban Kite has endured a somewhat checkered taxonomic history, being generally regarded as a species from its description until the 1960s, thereafter being treated as a subspecies of the Hook-billed Kite; by the late 1990s, doubts as to its revised status began to be raised again, with various authors (mainly of field guides and checklists) calling for its re-elevation to species status. Finally, in the 2022 supplement to its Checklist of North American Birds, the American Ornithologists’ Society decided to re-admit wilsonii as a species.