Flying Kites 19th December 2020

On a rural road within shouting distance of Silverstone Motor Racing Circuit, although you would not know it, lies a small house set just off the road. Every day the owner of the house feeds a small gathering of Red Kites and so used to this routine are the kites, that they begin to assemble well before the feeding time which is around four in the afternoon.

Around twenty five to thirty kites gather from a couple of hours before feeding time, flying around awaiting the food to be put out for them.There is rarely anyone to witness this but following a tip off from Dave, a friend of mine,  I went to see this spectacle for myself and spent a happy hour and a half  watching and photographing these fabulous birds, patiently cruising the air above me.

They mainly kept together, flying in a loose congregation, often quite low, around and above a wooded copse by the road before moving over to another part of the wood as if for a change of scenery.

Red Kite's fortunes in Britain have followed a rollercoaster course. Once commonplace in London in the sixteenth century, where they were an ever present and numerous scavenger, they eventually became extinct with the drive for improved sanitation and waste disposal in the city. The last bird was seen in London in 1890 and by the twentieth century, the additional pressures of egg collecting and the Victorian mania for taxidermy meant they had been reduced to a remnant population of a few pairs in mid Wales and were considered rare and endangered. Up until the late nineteen nineties one had to make a special trip to North Wales if you wanted to see the last ones remaining but between 1989-1993 thirty pairs were released in The Chilterns, on the border of Buckinghamshire and Oxfordshire and this met with such success there are now over two hundred  pairs breeding in The Chilterns alone. They are especially prolific in my county of Oxfordshire and I can recall when I first moved to Oxfordshire, many years ago, getting quite excited as, driving into Oxfordshire, I saw one fly over the M40 motorway that passes through Aston Rowant NNR in The Chilterns. This was one of the first that had been released on the re-introduction programme. Now they are a regular sight over many parts of the United Kingdom and can be said to have well and truly caught the general public's imagination and there are a number of commercial enterprises in England, Scotland and Wales where one can pay to go and see them in their hundreds coming to be fed at set times.

So successful have they become that one can be accused of being almost blase, but not quite, about their presence as they are now an everyday sight, soaring over villages and roads, even motorways in Oxfordshire and the surrounding counties. An inspiring success for nature in the face of the relentless negative pressures of humanity. 

The birds I went to see today were not, however, in Oxfordshire but in Northamptonshire, virtually on the border of Buckinghamshire. I stood on the grass verge by the road and watched the kites circling above me, the sun burnishing their streaked, orange brown bodies to a chestnut richness and accentuating their white heads and eyes.They are a handsome bird with a pleasing underwing pattern of black,white and orange overlaid with dark barring. 

As they circled, various individuals called frequently, a tremulous whee whee wheeeoo. It is impossible not to be impressed by these large birds, their long, narrow, slightly flexed wings allowing them to glide and swoop effortlessly. Their tail is also long, distinctively forked and seems to possess movement independent of the rest of the bird. Like a giant rudder, for that is its function, it swings and tilts, steering the bird in whatever direction it wishes to go.

As the time passed so did the sun sink lower in the sky, even though it was only just after three in the afternoon. The kites continued to hang in the air, waiting, waiting for the appointed feeding time. I needed to be elsewhere and left them to their airborne vigil. I now know they will be here everyday so will certainly return to enjoy their company on another day.