Red Kites...

I’ve spent a lot of time driving along the M40 this year back to my old haunts around Oxfordshire. Nothing much has changed. The old tumble-down barns of my childhood are now incredibly expensive executive homes and all of the villages are carefully manicured as opposed to the lived-in farming communities I remember, but the dock ponds are still there and some of the old pubs remain, not enough but a few.

There is a change in the skies though.

As a boy I was a keen bird watcher. I kept my list of ‘birds I have spotted’ in a small red notebook that I bought from the bottom shop for four-pence. It was quite a long list. I had all of the usual birds - tits, gulls, coots, swans, and some harder to spot items – egrets, kingfishers, barn owls, most of the birds of prey. One bird I didn’t have in my spotter’s book and desperately wanted though was the Red Kite.

The red kite was very rare when I was a boy. By the end of the last century persecution meant that the bird was almost exterminated. There were none in England or Scotland and most of Wales. The Red Kite was seen as a threat to expanding agriculture back in the 16th Century so a series of Vermin Acts were passed, requiring 'vermin' including the Red Kite to be killed throughout the parishes of Wales and England.

The extermination continued throughout the 17th and 18th Centuries, and when increasing numbers of gamekeepers were employed on the newly acquired country estates of noveau riche merchants the whole process was speeded up. By the late 18th Century Red Kites had bred for the last time in England and the story in Scotland was very similar. Only in rural Mid Wales did Red Kites hang on, their numbers down to just a few pairs and at that point a few local landowners had the foresight to set up an unofficial protection programme to try to safeguard them.

I once went to Mid Wales on a field trip in my first year of senior school and spent the whole week scouring the skies for a Red Kite. I never saw one. Although on a couple of occasions I almost convinced myself that I did, but each time it was just a buzzard. I wonder if you can spot me in the snap below.
Then in 1989, The Aston Rowant Nature Reserve, not far from where I was brought up, became one of the initial four sites selected by the RSPB and Natural England for the reintroduction to England of the Red Kite. They brought in birds from Spain initially, but the Chiltern-based reintroduction programme has been so successful that the local population has now self-generated to well over 200 pairs and continues to grow.

A couple of weeks ago I counted eighteen birds in a ten minute drive through the Chilterns. I parked up for a while by the side of my favourite field to watch a couple in flight and one of the birds swept down towards me to almost ground level. That’s it in the picture. It was a magnificent russet red and that forked tail makes the Kite unmistakable – no buzzard this time.

On my way back up I always look to see how far north the last Red Kite I spot is. So far it’s around Banbury on the M40, I’m hoping that one day I’ll be able to look out of my window in Manchester and see a Red Kite circling high in the air above me. I wonder how may decades it will take?