The striking silhouette of a red kite, soaring above a multi-story carpark in High Wycombe.
This is how most of us will see these birds and if you spend much time driving on the M40 between West London and Birmingham you will certainly see a number of them. They thrive on roadkill and, having been reintroduced into the Chilterns in 1989, that group have lost no time in adopting human road systems as routes for their own travel.
Four-hundred or more years ago, red kites lived throughout Britain and Ireland and were a common sight even in cities, Shakespeare wrote of them stealing underwear from clotheslines. Kites had and still have diverse appetites, eating carrion, insects, earthworms, small birds, rabbits, rodents and amphibians. Where they used to scavenge on man-made rubbish and carrion they were often welcomed as useful in cleaning the streets.
But one hundred years ago the picture was very different. By then they had been declared as 'vermin' and even had a bounty on their heads. They had been shot, trapped and poisoned out of existence by head-hunters, landowners, farmers and gamekeepers and their eggs were stolen by collectors. Other birds of prey were treated with the same arrogant brutality, though most survived in larger numbers than the unfortunate red kites. Only a handful of kites were left in the whole of the British Isles, these were all in the West of Wales.
Today the kites are back. Once they were fully protected, from 1950, the Welsh population began to expand, though initially quite slowly. DNA analysis a few years ago showed that the original handful of Welsh kites were all descended from a single female, indicating how precarious their position was. Now the Welsh birds number in the low thousands, though for scientific purposes birds are usually counted in breeding pairs, so around 900 to 1,000 breeding pairs. Non-breeding kites can travel long distances and are impossible to count.
Birds from this successful Welsh population have been used to re-introduce the species to Eire, and Northern Ireland. Once known in Ireland as 'cloth kites,' due to a propensity to incorporate pieces of pilfered rag into their nests, they were extinct by the turn of the 20th century. A successful population has now been established in County Wicklow and Dublin. Re-introductions to County Down in Northern Ireland have also been successful and as kites have no concern for national borders these two populations have begun to emerge and expand.
In England red kites have been re-introduced in groups, using birds originating in Spain and Scandinavia. The birds were released in the Chilterns, Hertfordshire, Northamptonshire, Yorkshire, Gateshead, Northumberland and the Newcastle area and Grizedale Forest in Cumbria. From these sites they have spread enthusiastically and if you keep your eyes open, there are kites to be seen gliding elegantly above every English county.
The Scottish population was initially centred around release sites, the first of these in 1989, was at Black Isle near Inverness. Others were in Dumfries and Galloway, Stirling-shire, Perthshire, Ross-shire, and near Aberdeen City. These reintroductions have all been successful, though in places the birds are still being killed, sometimes by accident as when they eat poisoned bait left for foxes, but too often deliberately, by people who like killing things.
There is no justification for killing kites, which are lightweight birds despite their 5-6 foot wingspans. They are not strong hunters and feed manly on carrion, worms and insects, with small birds, rabbits, rats and mice if they happen to be able to catch them. They are little threat to larger farm animals or pets.
All the re-introduced groups have formed breeding populations and the total number in the UK today is around 2,000 pairs, according to the RSPB, who keep a close eye on them. Still not a huge number of birds, but where they live, they are quite visible and not afraid to fly over towns and cities. The first kite for 150 years was seen in London in 2006.
This is a conservation success, unlike in much of Europe where they are declining. The red kite is a European bird, with around 50,000 birds, few are found elsewhere. From a handful of kites a hundred years ago, the British Isles is now home to more than 4,000 of these handsome birds, which is a significant percentage of the Total European population.
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