The Scissor-tailed Kite is one of the few hawks which is gregarious, sleeping at communal roost at night and hunting in loose flocks. It may also nest in loose colonies. It is distributed across the breadth of the Afrotropics, but in a narrow band largely confined to 15°N to 8°N.This area includes Benin, Burkina Faso, Cameroon, Central African Republic, Chad, Ivory Coast, Djibouti, Eritrea, Ethiopia, Gambia, Ghana, Kenya, Liberia, Mali, Mauritania, Niger, Nigeria, Senegal, Somalia, Sudan, Togo, and Uganda. It is also found in Yemen. Its diet is reptiles (such as lizards and snakes), insects and spiders, and occasionally small rodents. It is gregarious and will gather in groups at the edge of grass fires to capture grasshopper and crickets (Orthoptera) or near cattle herds to capture insects. It hunts on the wing, by soaring and hovering before descending to hawk the flying prey or catch it on the ground. It's current world population is less than 6,700 adult individuals with a decreasing trend. The species has declined over West Africa since the 1970s as a result of locust control, and it is vulnerable to pesticides. Given its reliance on the Sahel zone it is likely to be vulnerable to the on-going deterioration of this environment. Rendered in Poser 2014 GD without postwork. Models include Flink's Sunsets, rDNA fields and the Scissor-tailed Kite from my Songbird ReMix Birds of Prey Volume 5.