The plumbeous kite (Ictinia plumbea) is a bird of prey in the family Accipitridae that is resident in much of northern South America.

The plumbeous kite was formally described in 1788 by the German naturalist Johann Friedrich Gmelin in his revised and expanded edition of Carl Linnaeus's Systema Naturae.

[2] Gmelin based his description on the "spotted-tailed hawk" that had been described in 1781 by the English ornithologist John Latham from a specimen from Cayenne in a private collection in London.

[3] It is now placed with the Mississippi kite in the genus Ictinia that was introduced in 1816 by the French ornithologist Louis Pierre Vieillot.

The specific epithet plumbea is from Latin plumbeus meaning "leaded", "plumbeous" or "lead-coloured".

Sexes are similar, but immature birds have white-streaked grey upperparts and dark-streaked whitish underparts.

Birds in the north and south of the breeding range, including the populations in Central America, Trinidad, Venezuela and Colombia, and southern Argentina and Brazil, are migratory, moving into tropical South America in the northern winter.