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Ex-Environment Minister, now Secretary of State for Culture, Media and Sport, Ben Bradshaw is interviewed in today's Independent on Sunday (probably because he has moved up from 24 to 8 in the paper's Pink List).  Although he was not my favourite Environment Minister (maybe I should tell you who was some time?), because he allowed more cormorants to be killed, he makes a good point in his interview.  He is quoted as saying 'It's great being in charge of a department whose role is to spread pleasure and happiness.  It's almost as if, at a time of economic uncertainty, people need that cultural and sensual nourishment even more.'.

Well, we do need all that.  And aren't all government departments supposed to be giving us cultural and sensual nourishment?  Certainly Defra should.  The smell of flowers, the pattern on a butterfly's wings and the song of a skylark all nourish us.  Nature is part of our cultural heritage.

I feel very mixed emotions about the current enthusiasm for valuing wild nature.  In one respect it must be true that a lot of destruction of nature happens because we don't value it properly - why else would we be cutting down rainforests that are doing such a good job for us.  If only we valued them better for their carbon storage, water purification, flood alleviation and food supply then we would never cut down rainforests to grow palm oil. So a hard-nosed economic appraisal of the value of nature and wildlife seems like it could be very useful.

But the song of the skylark is difficult to value in terms of anything other than cultural and spiritual nourishment. 

And we aren't a very cultured nation or species if we don't regard the song of the skylark as being important just as Mozart's Magic Flute is, or the BBC, or the Olympic Games.  So maybe nature conservation ought to be part of Mr Bradshaw's Department's remit in Culture, Media and Sport?  Or at least we should behave as though we are all naturally cultured.  

I wish I lived in Kent because there is a fantastic showing of Heath Fritillary butterflies at our nature reserve at Blean Woods.  This has been covered in the Independent and the Daily Telegraph this week.  The photograph in the Torygraph is great.  Get there soon or they'll be gone!

I said I'd come back to Birdtrack.  This is a website where you can put your UK and Ireland bird sightings and they will be kept safely.  This is good for you if you are the type of person who likes to be able to be able to review what birds you've seen but don't want to have to spend time going through lots of old notebooks.  And it's good for ornithology and nature conservation too, because your sightings are available to the BTO and RSPB (and Birdwatch Ireland) to build up an even better picture of bird distributions, arrival and departure dates and trends in numbers.  We do know a lot about birds but there is plenty that we don't - and Birdtrack will fill in some of the gaps.

There's a little bit of effort involved in logging on to the system and setting up your own sites but after that you are away.

Here are a couple of simple analyses I've done with my own records that I find interesting.

From 1992-98 I had the same office at The Lodge and kept a window list each year.  So I know the first day that I saw each species.  In 1992 spotted flycatchers were a common  sight but they became rarer and rarer as time went on - I haven't seen one at all so far this year!  And during those seven years it seemed that the spot flys arrived later each year:

1992               18 May

1993               19 May

1994               10 May

1995               22 May

1996               21 May

1997               24 June

1998                3 June

Maybe not completely convincing because we don't know which days I was in the office.  But suggestive and interesting - at least to me.  And possible because I put the records into Birdtrack and it's so easy to look at them in this type of way.

Here's another example.  At Stanwick Lakes, my local patch in Northants, I keep a list of which species I see on every visit and all of them go onto Birdtrack.  So far this year I haven't seen a turtle dove at Stanwick, and yet  I'm sure they used to be quite regular.  Well here are the results for the last five years:

2005      6 records in 13 visits

2006      2 records in 4 visits

2007      1 record in 4 visits

2008      1 record in 10 visits

2009      0 records in 9 visits

It certainly looks as though they are a lot rarer these days.  The same thing is happening right across the country - and that's where Birdtrack will be so powerful over the years - the patterns of arrival dates and numbers added up across thousands of observers (including you?) will paint a clearer, richer picture of the ups and downs of bird populations. 

Give it a try!  Your records of barn owls, kingfishers and any other species are really useful - particularly if you can keep full lists of all species you see.

Some farmers may be choking on their cornflakes when they read in the Daily Telegraph that Lord Mandelson is their most powerful ally in their campaign to avoid being required to replace the environmental benefits of set-aside. Lord Mandelson's Business Department is against almost any form of new regulation on any industry - phew! it's a good job that we've already decided that sending kids up chimneys is a bad idea, otherwise Lord Mandelson would presumably be against making that illegal.

Times were when other government departments quaked in fear of The Treasury - after all they have the cash - but now it seems that kingmaker Mandelson holds most clout.  But it is odd that The Treasury haven't intervened to point out that at a time when public money is tight, the option of requiring farmers to replace some of the wildlife benefits of set-aside seems quite a good one compared with paying £30m for the same benefit.  Well, maybe £30m of our money isn't worth bothering about.

I have been told so many times that no decision has been made that I definitely don't believe it!  It seems that the otherwise utterly admirable Hilary Benn is about to do the wildlife that he cares about a great disservice.  If so, then you have to wonder whether Defra has reverted to MAFF - a government department that did what its clients, farmers, wanted rather than pursue the public interest. 

For Defra to go back on the advice of its expert committee, to choose a 'voluntary' option put forward by the NFU which volunteers nothing except to suck up more taxpayers' money, to choose the industry vested interest rather than the public interest, to choose the union view rather than government's own statutory advisor's view,  to choose the more expensive option, to choose the more uncertain option is such a poor decision that it makes one weep.

However,  we seem to be heading for the option that will appease the NFU and stop its officers throwing their toys out of their pram rather than the one which delivers the best value for the public.

Although such an outcome is difficult to accept it seems we will have to.  And we will.  Because the plight of farmland birds is so dire that the RSPB can't sulk on the sidelines but will have to find as many ways as possible of working positively with Defra and the NFU in order to limit the damage to wildlife. We can do that - we must.  Sometimes being a voice for nature means biting your tongue!

We are approaching the decision on set-aside replacement that has cropped up a few times in this blog.  We aren't hopeful of a good environmental choice from Defra - rumour has it that the NFU 'voluntary' approach may be the chosen option.

However, the media seem to be waking up to the peculiarity of the consultation process and how odd a decision it would be if Hilary Benn opted for something that is vague, has little chance of success and will cost the taxpayer a lot of money!  Hooray!  To opt for the 'voluntary' scheme (where farmers volunteer to take your money!) would be more wacko than the late lamented Jacko!

We are expecting an article by the distinguished environmental columnist Geoffrey Lean in tomorrow's Daily Telegraph.

This is an amazing image of an amazing animal.  This tiger is walking around the Harapan rainforest on Sumatra where the RSPB, Burung Indonesia (our partner in Indonesia) and BirdLife International are working together to protect the forest from destruction and to restore it to its former glory.  

I've never visited Harapan so I can't talk from personal experience but colleagues who have been there come back with tales of its richness.  Rainforests are perversely difficult places to see wildlife - there's lots of it out there but somehow it seems to hide very well.  The chances of seeing a tiger are very slim - tiger footprints are perhaps more likely - but face-to-face tiger encounters are rare (maybe just as well - those are big teeth).  This tiger took its own picture - by passing along the track it triggered the camera which let us have this special and privileged view.

I'd love to see a tiger - I bet you would too.  The rainforest is the home to thousands, maybe millions of species, most of them creepy crawlies, and I am very glad that they are there, but it would be the tiger that would draw me to these life-filled, Earth-girdling forests.  You can't get much more charismatic than a tiger.

When I think of the rainforests of southeast Asia I think of tigers, gibbons and tapirs; I think of birds such as trogons and hornbills; I think of green cathedrals of trees filled with life; but I should also think of an atom of mass 14, peaty soils and keeping the world's climate within manageable limits.  The Harapan rainforest is a massive carbon store - in the trees, in the soils and a little bit in the tigers.

About a fifth of global greenhouse gas emissions come from forest destruction.  And that destruction is a major cause of species extinction.  The RSPB's work with national and local governments and conservationists to conserve rainforests in Indonesia and Sierra Leone will contribute to saving species and saving the climate.  Such win-win situations should form an important part of the Copenhagen climate-change discussions in December.  Wouldn't it be great if world leaders agreed to measures to stop rainforest destruction? 

Such measures would have to involve money flowing from the rich North to the poorer South - and I think it is amazing and wonderful that RSPB's members' money has helped that tiger to continue to pace through the lowland rainforest of Sumatra.  We have only had relatively small financial help from the UK Government on this front - though, to be fair, the Darwin Initiative paid for the camera that took this photograph!  In fact the EU and German and French governments have been much more help!  But if you would like to help us to save the tiger and save the climate then please do donate.

And with apologies to William Blake:

Forest, forest burning bright

Put the tigers all to flight

What irrational hand or eye

Allows your carbon stores to fry?

I guess it's my age, but I often look back to the 1960s for inspiration.  This extract of a speech by Bobby Kennedy speaks to me - in fact it speaks powerfully to me.

"Too much and too long, we seem to have surrendered community excellence and community values in the mere accumulation of material things. Our gross national product...if we should judge American by that - counts air pollution and cigarette advertising, and ambulances to clear our highways of carnage. It counts special locks for our doors and the jails for those who break them. It counts the destruction of our redwoods and the loss of our natural wonder in chaotic sprawl. It counts napalm and the cost of a nuclear warhead, and armored cars for police who fight riots in our streets. It counts Whitman's rifle and Speck's knife, and the television programs which glorify violence in order to sell toys to our children.

"Yet the gross national product does not allow for the health of our children, the quality of their education, or the joy of their play. It does not include the beauty of our poetry or the strength of our marriages; the intelligence of our public debate or the integrity of our public officials. It measures neither our wit nor our courage; neither our wisdom nor our learning; neither our compassion nor our devotion to our country; it measures everything, in short, except that which makes life worthwhile. And it tells us everything about America except why we are proud that we are Americans." Address, University of Kansas, Lawrence, Kansas, March 18, 1968.

Surely, now, at a time of global economic worry, we should realise, as Bobby Kennedy did, that economic growth is only part of what we want and need.  Our measures of economic progress include many 'bad' things and exclude many 'good' things.  This is the time to think hard about what sort of future we want and need.  I cannot imagine many current politicians, of any party, talking about 'the loss of natural wonder' - but they should.  

Swifts arrive with us in late April and are slipping away at the end of July so we don't have their company for long each year.  But they are close neighbours given that almost all swifts nest in our roofs!

What did they do before buildings?  Swifts must have been dependent on old trees and I guess in the time before Humankind cleared the forests there would have been a lot more old trees but it's difficult to guess whether swifts were much commoner or much rarer in those times.  The RSPB nature reserve at Abernethy Forest is one of the few places in the UK where there are tree-nesting swifts, and one day I'll make a special trip just to see them.

We are asking for help with information about swifts as they have recently been put on the Amber list because they are declining in numbers.

At our Headquarters at The Lodge we have put up swift nest boxes and played tapes of swift calls this year - and, rather amazingly! - some seem to be interested.  It is too late for nesting this year (probably) but maybe these birds will be back next year.  Let's hope so.

The sound of swifts screaming is a sound of summer - redolent of warm beer, cricket, garden barbecues and the hum of insects.

I was sad to hear that a dead golden eagle has been found by walkers in Glen Orchy, Argyll. 

Poisoning is suspected but confirmation depends on analyses. 

Although we think of birds of prey as being powerful and tough (and they are!), they are incredibly vulnerable to poisons. 

And poisoning is a cowardly way to murder - the killer knows well what he (it usually is a he) is doing but doesn't look his victim in the eye, doesn't see the illness and pain he causes and may be sleeping soundly at home or playing with his children when death finally strikes his victim.  I do wonder at the mentality of a person who could put out poisons that cause such agony.

But maybe we'll find that this bird died of natural causes - after all, not even golden eagles are immortal.

I've been out doing the second visit to 'my' Breeding Bird Survey square.  The virtuous feeling I have when I get back home at 07:30 having collected bird data for the BTO and the RSPB is about as virtuous as I ever feel!

I noticed that there was quite a lot of slender foxtail in the fields.  This is a native annual grass found throughout the UK but commonest on heavy soils in the south and east of England and is also known as hungerweed and rat-tail grass.   OK, I'll come clean, it's known by farmers as black grass which is partly because its seed heads look black at some times of year but also because it is one of the worst weeds of cereal crops.  You don't call your worst enemy slender foxtail, you call it something nasty like black grass.

If you are in the southeast of England and stop by a field of wheat, crouch down and look across the top of the wheat stems, and you will probably see patches of a longer grass (because, after all, wheat is a grass) sticking up above the crop - this is likely to be black grass.  Look in the hedgerows and the verges and you'll see it too but probably not in great abundance.

Wheat yields drive the profit for much arable farming in the UK - prices for wheat have varied from about £55/ton to £160/ton over the last few years.  And yields can vary from say 8 tons/hectare to about 12 tons/hectare.  Ideally, many farmers would grow wheat in all their fields every year but if you do then weeds such as black grass build up and cause bigger and bigger losses of yield.  So every other year, or maybe one year in three, each field grows a different crop, usually a broad-leaved crop such as oilseed rape or beans (rahter than another cereal such as barley) .  In these non-cereal crops it is easier to use herbicides that will clobber the grasses such as black grass (or slender foxtail - such a nice name!).

Of course black grass is only a weed because it is inconvenient to us and because it is well suited by the way that we try to grow wheat.  Black grass flowers from May to the autumn and sheds most of its seeds before harvest in July or August.  The seeds remain dormant until the autumn which means that they start to grow over the winter when the fields of winter wheat are bare.  To get rid of the black grass large amounts of herbicide are used but now the black grass is developing resistance to them and so it is a war between the imagination of the chemical herbicide makers and the grass.

If you walk down a green lane between arable fields, as I did this morning, you'll see many species of grass and it would be impossible to tell which might be the biggest problem for the farmer in the nearby fields.  If you knew about the grasses' biology and the timing of agricultural activity you might be better placed to identify the potential weeds.  But really, you'd have to know which would stand up to the chemical barrage of herbicides before you could predict that it would be black grass heads that you see waving above the wheat crop.

The slender foxtail causes us a lot of problems - but you have to admire its resilience, just a bit.  

There is no way that I could say everything that I might want to say about hen harriers in a short blog.  So this is a bit of a heads-up and we'll come back to the subject at a later date - probably around 12 August, the start of the grouse-shooting season!  For the fate and future of this bird is intimately bound up with that peculiarly British upland pursuit of shooting red grouse.

I can remember the first hen harrier I ever saw - it was at Studland in Dorset one late December or early January day when out birdwatching with some school friends.  A female bird - brown, with a prominent square white rump - quartering the saltmarsh looking for voles and small birds.  Years later, in my gap year before university, I spent two months volunteering for the RSPB at Minsmere in the winter and one of the greatest thrills of that time was watching hen harriers - grey adult males and brown females and immatures - coming in to roost in the evening.

Those hen harriers which often winter on our coasts, return to the hills to try to nest.  Heather moorland and the early stages of conifer plantations are the preferred nesting sites for hen harriers.  They nest on the ground and search for voles, pipits and skylarks to feed their young.  In fact it is the number of these small birds which determine the local densities of hen harriers - the more of their favoured prey the more harriers there should be.  Now, if hen harriers restricted their attentions to pipits, larks and voles they would have an easier life, but like most raptors they will take a wide variety of prey and that includes some adult and many young red grouse.  That's what gets them into trouble!

There's no getting away from the fact that hen harriers do eat grouse chicks.  You can't blame them either - some parts of the uplands of Britain, particularly the north of England and eastern Scotland are managed so that their red grouse densities are way above natural levels so you can't fly very far as a harrier before getting the chance to have a go at a nice fluffy bite-sized grouse chick.  In the past, but this is going back about 15 years, the RSPB would, wrongly, have said that we didn't think that hen harriers would make much difference to the number of red grouse that are available to be shot in the autumn but all that came to an end with the results of a study which we helped fund into red grouse and hen harriers that took place at Langholm Moor in southern Scotland.  That study showed that if hen harriers are left unmolested on grouse moors then they can hoover up an awful lot of red grouse and make grouse-shooting completely unviable.  The way I, slightly mischievously perhaps, like to describe it is that the hen harriers don't stick to the rules and rather unsportingly eat all the grouse that people want to pay to kill after 12 August.

So there is a lot more that can be said, but the nub of the matter is this.  Is commercial grouse-shooting possible in the presence of hen harriers that are not persecuted? If the answer is 'yes' then potentially the conflict can be resolved.  But if the answer is 'no' then it seems you have to choose between grouse shooting and hen harriers. 

At the moment the hen harrier is losing badly - which pains me a lot.  There should be well over 100 pairs of hen harrier living on the moors of northern England but actually there are around a dozen or so.  We believe that the discrepancy is because hen harriers are systematically killed each year in large numbers by gamekeepers under the orders, or sometimes just the unspoken expectation, of owners.  It's amazing how often people will talk about the 'harrier problem' when they mean that there are too many of them - they must be thinking of the bodies because there are hardly any flying around, eating grouse and looking magnificant in the north of England. This so-called pest is a rarity!

Should we walk away from this issue? Are we treating it as too important?  Well, it seems to me that if the RSPB doesn't stand up for hen harriers (and all the other birds of prey that are shot, trapped and poisoned) then there are precious few others who will.  I couldn't turn my back on the fact that a wonderful and protected bird is still being killed by people who see themselves as above the law.

Is there a simple solution where the impacts of hen harriers on grouse bags could be reduced? Well, artificial feeding of harriers might divert their attention from grouse but it seems like quite a lot of work - still, it must be worth the effort to try to find a solution.

We are always being told we must be more reasonable and that what is needed is a way that moorland managers can put a cap on harrier numbers - instead of killing lots of harriers moorland managers seem to want to be allowed to kill fewer but enough to keep grouse-shooting viable.  What do you think of that idea?

If anyone out there has a clever solution then please do let me know.

If, like me, you are on the side of the hen harrier, and you think that any attempt to weaken its legal protection because its diet is inconvenient for some commercial interests is misguided then please do sign our bird of prey pledge - you'll be joining more than 110,000 others.

I think of sparrowhawks as the cheetahs of the bird world.  They are short-chase predators that rely on their speed and agility to capture their prey.  Their short, rounded wings enable them to weave through cover in pursuit of small birds.  And this is a predator that depends almost entirely on catching, killing and eating small birds - although sometimes the eating starts before the killing is quite accomplished.  In the real world there is no animal welfare legislation that applies to sparrowhawks - they are efficient, highly-evolved killers.  Sparrowhawks are never going to order a green salad in their lives - they just kill birds and eat them while they are still warm!  And if they don't kill - they die.

And cheetahs have the same lifestyle except they are chasing down small antelopes, often young antelopes, on the plains of Africa, throttling them and then getting stuck in to eating their bloody flesh.   

Neither cheetahs nor sparrowhawks are asking for our approval for their lifestyle but I, for one, am willing to give my admiration for what evolution has delivered.  We are all killers by proxy (I except those of you who are vegan), so even though it makes no sense at all to look at the morals of the sparrowhawk, few of us would be in a good position to cast the first stone.  Sparrowhawks do their killing in the open and their lives depend on it.  Our own feeding habits depend on killing too, except rather few of us are involved in doing the rounding up, killing, eviscerating and butchering of our prey. 

Having an avian cheetah in your garden or local wood is a privilege.  If you admire the avian killing machines then please sign our bird of prey pledge to ensure that those who demonise them and wish to do them harm cannot succeed.  You'll be joining over 110,000 others.

Tomorrow's focus will be on what is arguably the UK's most persecuted bird of prey - the hen harrier.

The UK has led the world, by bringing in a Climate Change Act, in putting ourselves on a drastic carbon-diet.  We are committed to reducing our carbon emissions by 80% by 2050. 

Now if you had a look at me you would see that I'm not the best person to talk about diets, but I do think I understand the basic idea.  To lose weight you have to cut down on the burgers, chips and beer.  You might eat lettuce instead, as a replacement, but you don't get thin just by eating more lettuce.  And it's the same with carbon diets.  We have to cut down on the high-emitting coal-fired power stations, the flights abroad and car use if we are to get anywhere near the 80% figure. Renewable energy won't make us thin unless it replaces burning fossil fuels.

And as with food diets, on carbon diets some things are more difficult to give up than others.  The government already gave in to temptation by saying yes to a third runway at Heathrow - what sort of a diet is that?  This week, probably today, the government is going to tell us whether we can kick dirty coal into touch. 

The road to climate-change hell is paved with good intentions.

The kestrel differs from the buzzard and red kite in two important respects.  It is declining in numbers rather than increasing and the reasons for its problems are not much to do with illegal persecution.

A kestrel hovering above some grassland, looking for voles to eat, is still a familiar sight in our countryside.  I remain amazed at the apparent ease with which a kestrel can hold itself still in the wind. Watch its head as it beats its wings and adjusts its tail - the head is kept as still as can be as it searches for a scurrying prey below it. 

Another name for the kestrel is the windhover and that was the title chosen by Gerard Manley Hopkins for his poem where he celebrates the art and skill of the hovering bird.  I find it a difficult poem but Manley Hopkins's enthusiasm for the kestrel is not in doubt.

Kestrels are popular - we chose a hovering kestrel as the emblem of the Young Ornithologists' Club which was the forerunner of our current youth membership category - Wildlife Explorers. I wore my kestrel badge with pride.

But on the web you can find Kestrel FM radio station, the Kestrel computer science institute, Kestrel wind meters, Kestrel jewellery, Kestrel dinghies, Kestrel signs and Kestrel engineering.  We seem to like our kestrels and so we should.

Kestrels are declining in numbers here as in many other parts of Europe.  Kestrels are at the top of the food chain (although they themselves are sometimes killed by larger raptors) and so if they are declining it is likely to mean that the whole food web below them is suffering in some way.  If there are lots of kestrels then there must be lots of voles and insects for them to eat.  If kestrels are declining then their food supply is likely to be declining too.

Fewer scruffy patches of rough grassland, and indeed the loss of pasture from much of eastern England, are likely to be reasons for a drop in vole populations.  If we had a more diverse countryside with more mixed farming then kestrels would get a bit of a boost.

If you would like to speak up for birds of prey like the kestrel then please do sign our pledge - you'll be joining more than 110,000 others.

Tomorrow's focus will be on the sparrowhawk.

I sometimes need to get a train north from Peterborough station and my drive east takes me past Thrapston, Oundle and Elton.  If the sun is shining then I would expect to see a red kite or two along this route (a red kite is much more likely than a lapwing - a sad comment on the state of farmland birds in this part of the world).

Although a similar-sized bird to the buzzard, I don't have to take my eyes off the road for long to distinguish between them - the kites are longer tailed and the wings tend to be bowed in flight.  The fork in the red tail is a give-away if the bird is close enough.  And if I drive right under one then I can look up (I am concentrating on driving really!) and see the red, forked tail twist from side to side in the air.  They are lovely birds - and unusually, perhaps for birds of prey - even the most prejudiced against raptors rarely have a word to say against the beautiful red kite.

As a boy, growing  up in Bristol then the only place to see red kites was mid-Wales.  I remember a number of trips which produced distant views of this rare bird circling over a Welsh sheep walk or oak woodland.  The kite then was a difficult bird - you had to make quite an effort to see one.  But it was always worth it.

But now the red kite is a familiar sight in many parts of the UK and set to become ever more familiar thanks to a reintroduction programme by the RSPB, Natural England and Scottish Natural Heritage. Kites, almost certainly red kites rather than black kites, were once seen over the streets of London and even now it is difficult to think of any part of the UK which should lack this beautiful bird of prey. The latest reintroduction project started in Northern Ireland in 2008.

To see the extent of the success of this reintroduction programme do have a look at the Birdtrack site.  More about Birdtrack at another time, but this web-site will allow you to look at maps of the accumulated red kite sightings of hundreds of birdwatchers (including my own - and yours too, if you register).  Go to the 'Latest results' page, select 'Britain and Ireland' rather than a region of the British Isles, and then select red kite and scroll down to the map.  You'll see that red kites are now being seen in many, many places outside Wales.  In fact you can just about pick out the sites where reintroductions have taken place - the Chilterns, East Midlands, Yorkshire, Gateshead, Dumfries and Galloway, Perthshire, Aberdeen, Inverness and now Northern Ireland.  All those red dots across the country are thanks to the reintroduction programme which started in The Chilterns and near Inverness in 1989 and to which other sites (moving north from southern England, and south from northern Scotland) have been added every few years.

One of the villages I pass on the way to Peterborough is Lilford - a site of great ornithological history (of which more another time) - and a good place to see red kites.  The fourth Baron Lilford wrote about red kites in his book on the birds of Northamptonshire in the late 19th century.  He expressed his sorrow at the lack of red kites in the county at the time of writing and harked back to his youth, I guess around 1830, when he had been taken out onto the lawns of Lilford Hall to be shown red kites circling above.

I regard it as a great example of environmental progress that my children are the first generation of Northamptonshire children for over 150 years to have grown up with red kites as a normal part of their lives.  We see kites over the garden, we see them on our way to Scouts, music classes and coming back from doing the shopping.  With a bit of effort we could see red kites every day of our lives - and that's great!  But the flip side to this is that previous generations have been deprived of the sight of this bird and it has taken a concerted conservation effort to put red kites back into the landscape again.

And although the red kite population recovery is probably unstoppable individual birds are still vulnerable to illegal poisons and being shot.  This month a red kite was found dead, poisoned, on an estate in the Scottish Borders.  It shocks me that so many of these beautiful and innocent birds are killed despite them having full legal protection - and killed in such a painful way. 

To help us make the case that birds of prey are important parts of our wildlife and need full legal protection please sign our pledge.

Tomorrow's blog will focus on another raptor - the kestrel.