Features Editor

Miles walked this month: 99

Oh deer

I should start by saying this story is a bit grisly. I was out on my regular lunchtime walk, bimbling along a country lane, when I saw three red kites lift from a field beside the road. Wondering what had drawn them to ground from their usual high-gliding, I peeped over the hedge. There was a fallow deer. A dead fallow deer. I was upset at the sight and hurried on along the lane, but I couldn’t ignore that it was now providing valuable food for the kites, those whistling raptors with six-foot wings that once faced extinction in Britain.

Let’s go watch a kite

Two days later I passed the still-busy field again and realised this could be a chance to see one of these amazing birds closer than I ever had. I steeled my stomach and wedged myself in a hole in the hedge, thinking it would give me cover to watch the birds come to feed. Ha. They flew to and fro, eyeballing me as if to say ‘We see you, you fool’.

I dragged myself out and left; they then landed.

Life cycle

Another two days and all that remained of the deer was its skeleton, its ribs like the hull of a shipwreck lying in a field. It was astonishing how quickly, and how thoroughly, the kites (with help from some corvids) had picked it clean, wasting nothing. In death it had sustained life in a host of other creatures.

Note to self: Nature is famously red in tooth and claw, so try not to be so squeamish...