Shitehawk - Origin of The Term

Origin of The Term

The term "shite-hawk" is believed to have originated as military slang by the British Army in India and Egypt, as a derogatory term for the Black Kite (Milvus migrans), which is notorious for its coprophagous habits, and was despised by soldiers for its habit of stealing food from their plates:

At the transit camp the British soldier normally made his acquaintance with the kite-hawk, known familiarly as the 'shite-hawk'. 'There used to be thousands of them,' remembers Charles Wright. 'When one drew one's food from the cook-house and went to take it across to the dining room to eat at the tables underneath the sheds, these kite-hawks would swoop down and take the lot off your plate if you weren't careful. So you had to walk waving your arms above the plate until you got it under cover.' —Charles Allen, Plain Tales from the Raj

Eric Partridge, a noted expert on etymology and slang, claims that the term was used to refer to the vulture by the soldiers in the British Army in India during the period 1870–1947, although the earliest recorded use of the term in print in the Oxford English Dictionary is 1944. In recent years, in the United Kingdom, the term "shite-hawk" has also been applied to the Herring Gull (Larus argentatus), which is known for its mobbing and scavenging behaviour.

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