Red Kites

As I walked up to the ridge of the Preseli’s, I stopped to admire a large bird of prey circling above my head. I realised it was a Red Kite, easily identified by its forked brown tail and characteristic white blocks on the underpart of its wings. Boasting an impressive 6-foot span between the black finger like tips it is easy to see the markings on its sharp angled wings, even from far below.

Its rusty coloured body was decorated with paler speckles underneath, eventually blending into its pale head.

I felt excited when I saw another Red Kite following closely behind. They were probably mate’s, reunited after a winter apart. They performed their high circling displays, with deep exaggerated wing beats. Flying fast alongside one another before spiralling apart at the last minute.

This display of courtship will continue for the next couple of months, as they rekindle their bond from last year. They will also use this time to add to and repair last year’s nest, before the female lays a clutch of around three eggs in early April.

The female will sit on these eggs until they hatch thirty-days later, while the male takes on the job of gathering food. Red Kites are scavengers, taking food from discarded carcases, supplementing it with grubs and worms, and occasionally small mammals.

Once the chicks are two weeks old, they are able to feed themselves and the female red kite will join her partner in the foraging of food. At two months old the chicks are ready to fledge the nest, they stay in the area for a few weeks allowing their parents to help them with food before eventually wandering away, only to return to their birth area when they are mature adults and ready to breed with their life-long mate.

The Red kite story is an interesting one. During the Middle Ages the Red Kite’s impressive scavenging abilities played such a crucial role in keeping streets clean and vermin and decease at bay, that they were protected from harm by royal decree, with persecutors facing capital punishment.

However, this view began to change, as numbers increased. By the 15th century the Scottish saw them as vermin, resulting in King James II of Scotland lifted their royal protection in his country. By the 16th century the negative image of the red kite was also shared by the Welsh and English, who viewed them as a threat to the ‘produce of the countryside’. Gamekeepers began to see birds of prey as a threat to their own game and started to place a price on their heads.

As the number of red kites began to fall dramatically, their rarity made them even more desirable to taxidermists and egg collectors, who stole their eggs from the bird’s nests. However, in order to preserve the egg, the contents must be removed through a process called “blowing”. Here two small holes are made in the shell, the collector blows air into the top hole thus pushing the contents of the egg out though the bottom hole.

The chances of the egg cracking are high, so the collectors tend to take the whole clutch from the nest, so they have spares. Despite acts protecting bird eggs from such atrocities being in place since 1880, illegal egg collecting, and persecution of the red kite has created a downhill spiral in Kite population numbers.

By 1879, the Red Kite was extinct in Scotland and only a small number of pairs existed in very remote regions of Wales, but by this time the gene pool was now so low that all the surviving pair derived from one single female.

In the 1930’s, conservationists finally recognised that the Red Kite population was in jeopardy and protection efforts begin. However, several factors still hindering their growth. The 1950's outbreak of myxomatosis in rabbits caused a huge decline in the prey available to the kites as did the naturally poor weather in the location where the kites were situated. Man, also suppressed the growth with the continuation of illegal persecution and with the impact of using organochlorine pesticides. This resulted in the welsh chick production being way to low for the kites to be able to successfully spread into England and Scotland.

The RSPB recognised that the recovery was too slow and decided to take direct action to help the struggling Kites. In 1989 they started the Red Kite re-introduction programme along with the support of Natural England, Scottish Natural Heritage and numerous other bodies.

The Red kite reintroduction programme released 93 adult birds from Sweden and Spain into sites across Scotland and England in 1989 with more birds being brought over from Germany to colonise areas of Dumfries and Galloway in 1995. Between 2008 and 2010, 80 birds who came from successful Welsh stocks, were introduced successfully into Northern Ireland.

Taken from RSPB

The Red kite re-introduction programme can be seen as a massive success story. Thirty years after the reintroduction programme began, there are now 1800 breeding pairs across the UK.

They have gone from being on the RSPB’s red list, for species needing urgent action to their green list, which includes birds of the least conversational concern. The red kite population is now so healthy, the RSPB is unable to survey them on an annual basis. However, as the reintroduced birds and a portion of their fledged offspring are tagged it is possible to become involved with recording sighting of them and other birds at https://www.bto.org

These species are thriving, but they still face threats. Poison bates left out for other animals, will sometimes be consumed by the Red Kite. Illegal egg collecting still happens, but most egg collectors are deterred by a 6month prison sentence per egg.

I do hope these magnificent birds keep on thriving, and that their future remains bright.