12th January - Red Kite

Back in the sixties (I know a long time ago) I would sit at home and get my father to test me on the pictures in the Observer Book of Birds, 200 illustrations in colour and black and white and descriptions of 243 species.  I was word perfect, not missing any as he covered up the names and descriptions.  

There was one bird that always caught my imagination, a bird with a name that I just had to see, in the book it was just "Kite" and the picture was only in black and white.

Years later I knew it to be a Red Kite and I was also aware of its tenuous situation in the United Kingdom with breeding pairs only being found in parts of Wales.  Football and other interests subdued my interest in bird watching, but in the late eighties I became a lot more serious about birding and of course my lists.  The Red Kite quickly became a bird I just had to see and the opportunity arose through work.  A business trip one early summer to a company in Ammanford  in South Wales meant an overnight stay and an opportunity to visit the RSPB reserve at Cym Clydach.  Red Kite were reported there but I was going to have to be lucky.  

My memory of the visit to the reserve is hazy, but I can recall following a footpath through oak woodland where there were Pied Flycatcher and Redstarts and then coming out at the top onto moorland, where I managed a glimpse of a single Red Kite, I can still see the silhouette of the bird above the forked tail standing out so clearly.

I can't say I have a single favourite bird, I have lots, for instance it is hard for to separate Sanderling, Avocet, Greenshank and Spotted Redshank, I love an owl, but of the raptors the Red Kite is by far my favourite.  That evening in the Welsh reserve cemented that and today when I have up to four birds hanging over my garden in Four Marks, I still have to stop and watch as they twist and turn, and then stoop with no effort, their lazy flapping as they move so quickly a joy to watch.  

Over the last few weeks we have been subjected to heavy rain on and off and in between the days of rain there have been some quiet sunny interludes,  The Kites local to me have used these times to investigate the area and this has brought them in close to the garden.  Four at one time is the most I have had over the garden, and I have had some fun photographing them. I thought it was also an opportunity to write about my passion for the bird and also to provide some information.  On that summer evening in the early nineties I never believed I would be able to watch a Red Kite from my bedroom window.  One of the most successful re-introduction programmes in the United Kingdom is the reason for this.

I can only assume the birds are finding food or looking for food put out for them as they will come over the garden quite low and it is easy to get eye contact.  They will also respond to soft whistles.

It is a question of what came first, the word kite for a toy that is flown in the air or the name kite given to the Red Kite, well Geoffrey Chaucer wrote of kites in his Knight's Tail, a fifteen century manuscript refers to "ther cam a kyte", while the first reference to a kite the toy was in the seventeenth century.  So was the toy so called because it behaved like the graceful soaring of the Red Kite?

Centuries ago the Red Kites in the United Kingdom, were ubiquitous scavengers that lived on carrion and rubbish.  Shakespeare's King Lear describes his daughter Goneril as a detested kite, and he wrote "when the kite builds, look to your lesser linen" in reference to them stealing washing hung out to dry in the nesting season.  In the mid-15th century, King James II of Scotland decreed that they should be "killed wherever possible", but they remained protected in England and Wales for the next 100 years as they kept the streets free of carrion and rotting food.  Under Tudor "vermin laws" many creatures were seen as competitors for the produce of the countryside and bounties were paid by the parish for their carcasses.

By the 20th century, the breeding population was restricted to a handful of pairs in South Wales.   In 1989, six Swedish birds were released at a site in north Scotland and four Swedish and one Welsh bird in the Chilterns in Buckinghamshire.  Altogether, 93 birds of Swedish and Spanish origin were released at each of the sites. In the second stage of reintroduction in 1995 and 1996, further birds were brought from Germany to populate areas of Dumfries and Galloway.

It was the reintroductions in the Chilterns Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty have been a success.  Between 1989 and 1993, 90 birds were released there and by 2002,139 pairs were breeding.  Back in the early nineties on my visits home to my parents in Oxford from Essex, I would see Red Kites taking advantage of thermals from the M40 motorway around the Stokenchurch canyon.

Between 2004 and 2006, 94 birds were brought from the Chilterns and introduced into the Derwent Valley in north-east England.  In June of 2006, the UK-based Northern Kites Project reported that kites had bred in the Derwent Valley in and around Rowlands Gill, Tyne and Wear for the first time since the re-introduction.

The struggling Welsh population from the 1980s was supplemented by re-introductions in England and Scotland. In 2004, from 375 occupied territories identified, at least 216 pairs were thought to have hatched eggs and 200 pairs reared at least 286 young.

Another successful reintroduction has been in Northamptonshire, which has become a stronghold for the red kite.  Thirty Spanish birds were introduced into Rockingham Forest near Corby in 2000 and by 2010, the RSPB estimated that over 200 chicks had been reared from the initial release. So successful has the reintroduction been that 30 chicks have been transported from Rockingham Forest for release in Cumbria.  From the Chilterns they have spread as far east as Essex and can be seen over Harlow. To the west they have recently spread along the M4 as far as the Cotswold Edge overlooking the Severn near Bristol and beyond into Somerset.

In 1999, the Red Kite was named 'Bird of the Century' by the British Trust for Ornithology.   According to the Welsh Kite Trust, it has been voted "Wales's favourite bird".  A sighting of the first red kite in London for 150 years was reported in The Independent newspaper in January 2006.  In Northern Ireland, 80 birds from wild stock in Wales were released between 2008 and 2010, and the first successful breeding was recorded in 2010.

In June 2010, the Forestry Commission North West England announced a three-year project to release 90 red kites in Grizedale Forest, Cumbria under a special licence issued by Natural England. The Grizedale programme was the ninth reintroduction of red kites into different regions of the UK and the final re-introduction phase in England.

As of July 2011, non-breeding birds are regularly seen in all parts of Britain, and the number of breeding pairs is now too large for the RSPB to continue to survey them on an annual basis.

I hope I never tire of watching this beautiful bird of prey, I love the twists and turns, the angling of the forked tail as it rides what breeze and lift there is.  I also feel that the sight of a Red Kite drifting with lazy wing beats is similar to the CGI models of dragons in flight, I just love them.