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