Red kite threat from fast-food Britain
THE ROSETTE of foxy-hued feathers left spread-eagled on a bustling high street made a sad memorial to a once magnificent bird.
Flattened like some sat-on Ascot hat, few motorists paid notice as their wheels ran over the crumpled red kite which, only moments before, had graced the skies.
One could not escape the irony of looking at the pitiful remains of a majestic creature whose fortunes soared by scavenging on roadkill only to end up as one of the estimated 10 million birds killed by British traffic every year.
What peeves is the way the kite was lured to its death by some moronic driver blithely discarding fast-food leftovers from a vehicle in a town centre.
For all a kite’s expertise in detecting easy meals on the streets with acute eyes and then, showing superb flying skills, alight to grasp roadside scraps with razorsharp talons, the process of getting airborne again on floppy, 6ft wide pinions remains a deadly challenge when cars approach.
Witnessing the kite’s demise was a stark reminder of how the destiny of these iconic raptors in Britain has been as undulating as their flights.
Back in Tudor times, red kites with their deeply forked, ferruginous tails were as much a part of the London skyline as the wooden St Paul’s Cathedral and the ominous Tower of London.visiting Flemish naturalist Charles Clusius described huge flocks scouring the streets for titbits in numbers that exceeded Cairo.a statute was put in place to protect the kites for their valuable streetcleaning services, although 15th century Cockneys were taken aback by the birds’ brazenness.
“The kites are so tame that they often take out of the hands of little children, the bread smeared in butter given to them by their mothers,” wrote one observer.
What followed over successive centuries saw the red kite turn from hero to pariah.a clue to its demise can be found in its old country name of “puttock”, a short-form of poultry hawk. Blamed for being chicken coup thieves, bounties were placed on kites, with claimants getting two pence for each beak delivered to church wardens under the Stuarts.
By the timevictoria had ascended to the throne the red kite’s range was contracting as fast as the British Empire was expanding and the national population declined to a mere five pairs at the dawn of the 20th century.
The wild, wooded valleys of Wales had become its last refuge.
Turn the clock forward to 1989 and the red kite was to become the conservation story of the age with a reintroduction scheme bringing birds over from Spain to release in the Chiltern Hills. Successful projects followed in Northamptonshire, Yorkshire and Scotland and last month a new population assessment for red kites published in the British Birds journal revealed an estimated 4,400 pairs are now breeding across the country.
Such has been the restoration of this majestic creature that its nesting fortunes are no longer monitored by the Rare Breeding Birds Panel.their distinctive silhouettes are, once again, seen regularly over the streets of London and suburbia.
Therein lies the rub.while rural roads provide rich pickings in the shape of squashed bunnies, badgers and muntjac, our happy-to-discardfood-waste-at-a-whim society sullies city centres and puts kites in peril.
‘Conservation story of the age’