![]() ![]() ![]() Ultimately, the proposal met these criteria, and the first birds were released in 1989, in north Scotland and Buckinghamshire. Such an effort could only be considered if a species met the IUCN guidelines on translocation, which state, among other criteria, that the human-created factors leading to the local extinction had been addressed, and that the birds chosen to be introduced were as genetically similar as possible to the former indigenous population. In 1986, the RSPB and the Nature Conservancy Council (now Natural England and Scottish Natural Heritage) began to discuss the possibility of reintroducing the species back to England and Scotland. In the eighties, the Red Kite was one of only three native UK species to be considered globally threatened, thus making it a priority species for the RSPB. Enter stage left what would become the world’s longest continuous conservation project. Even then, concerns abounded about the low rate of chick production by the Welsh kites.Īlthough the RSPB and local people had been working on the species since 1905, primarily to protect nests from egg collectors, it was clear a bigger vision was needed to ensure the species could thrive in the UK. The 1870s saw the last recording of a breeding pair in England and Scotland, and in Great Britain, by the turn of the 1900s the species only persisted as five breeding pairs in central Wales, growing slowly to just over 50 pairs in the 1980s. “Public attitudes changed as sporting estates emerged, the rise in popularity of taxonomy and specimen-collecting brought their own pressures, and bounties were paid out for raptor control”. “In the 1800s, Red Kites disappeared very quickly”, says Orr-Ewing. You would not dare imagine that these fork-tailed raptors had, at one point, disappeared from England entirely. Throughout the various lockdowns in 2020, the graceful overhead circling of Red Kites proved to be a daily highlight for members of the Cambridgeshire-based BirdLife magazine team. Times change – and sometimes for the better. The species was widely dismissed as vermin, and indeed, King James of Scotland once decreed that they be “killed wherever possible”, but the species remained protected by law because – followers of the vulture crisis can stop us if this sounds familiar – they were prized for their efficiency in keeping the streets free of disease. A London where the streets were paved not with gold, but with rotting food and carcasses – perfect conditions for an opportunistic scavenger such as Red Kite Milvus milvus. There is a line of thinking that the ‘city of kites and crows’ mentioned in the play Coriolanus is a reference to the medieval London that Shakespeare knew in life. “This was a species that thrived on the poor sanitation of the time, and we know they were common even in central London.” ![]() ![]() “In the 1600s, the Red Kite was probably the commonest raptor in the British Isles”, says Duncan Orr-Ewing, Head of Species and Land Management, RSPB Scotland (our UK Partner). In King Lear, the eponymous monarch dismisses his deceitful daughter as a ‘detested kite’, and later makes remark to the raptor’s habit of stealing laundry to line their nests with the line: “When the kite builds, look to your lesser linen.” Far from having an irrational hatred of raptors, however, the world’s most famous bard was simply capturing the mood of the time. Shakespeare wrote of Red Kites – but not to praise them. ![]()
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