Wings of the week – Red Kite

For once, it was almost sunny, so I set off on my bike down Long Drove, camera in my backpack. Long Drove is a local country lane flanked by farmland, at least until you get to the dump and then to one side is a vast, active, fetid tip. The air there is usually thick with the odours of waste and thick with birds too. Indeed, there are usually thousands of gulls squabbling over the pickings at the tip, there are hundreds sat in the fields, and yet more huddling together on the warm roofs of the compost-processing barns.

There are also usually dozens of corvids, a few Common Buzzard (Buteo buteo), and at least twenty or thirty Red Kites (Milvus milvus). The hedgerows opposite the dump seethe with Common Starlings (Sturnus vulgaris). These occasionally erupted into brief, frantic murmurations  of several thousand birds, before settling again on the ground and in the bushes. They were not apparently spooked by the presence of the kites, but perhaps by a sight unseen.

Now, Red Kites, as I’ve mentioned before, are scavengers rather than raptors in the conventional sense. They’re the comeback kings having been extirpated entirely from these isles in the early 1900s. Reintroduction and feeding programmes have allowed them to re-establish populations and our patch seems to have become host to two big roosts, one close to the aforementioned dump, the other some way back along the Drove, closer to the village. Nationally, there are four or five thousand breeding pairs now. Zero to hero in thirty year or so.

As scavengers, the Red Kites are happy to rake across the farmland, swinging low and grasping with their talons at likely clumps or even landing and checking out the soil for wayward worms surfacing. The birds will then haul their catch up into the air and inspect whatever they have snagged. Precision is secondary to speed here, grab first, work it later.

They’ll peck at the catch on the wing, whittling out an earthworm from the mud and grass if they’re lucky. They peck and shake until the debris falls away and something edible remains. Other Red Kites will give chase if they think there is a chance of stealing a worm or maybe some snaffled carrion scavenged from the mud. The red kite is not fastidious; decay is no deterrent.