KITE FRIGHT
For green fans, dive-bombing birds of prey are a sign of success, reports HARRY MOUNT. But those under the talons have a very different point of view...
AS You approach the village of Stokenchurch on the Wycombe Road, the red kites start to gather. Stacked like planes in a holding pattern over Heathrow, they circle lazily in the sky, their whitetipped, 6ft wings at full stretch, whistling a haunting tune.
At first you see one, two, half a dozen, and then, over Chris’s Cafe, in Studley Green, just outside Stokenchurch, there is a great cloud of two dozen of the dark red birds. Every day, at 2pm, the cafe workers feed the red kites in the car park — ‘Bacon, sausage, chips, anything dry, no beans,’ says cafe worker Ryan Selwood, 23.
What a majestic sight they are, as they drift ever lower, before gathering their wings into an aerodynamic V-shape and making a formation dive. Part of the Accipitridae family, which also includes other diurnal raptors such as eagles and hawks, one after another they swoop down, picking up bacon in their talons, before soaring up into the sky again.
The problem is, it isn’t just the bacon at Chris’s Cafe they’re after. Three-year-old Ava Edgar-Francis, from Stokenchurch, was at a birthday party when a red kite plunged from the heavens above and pinched a cupcake from her hand. As it grabbed the cake, the bird scratched Ava’s head with its talons.
‘It was horrendous — she was so upset,’ said Ava’s mother, Debbie Francis. ‘It swooped in, claws first. There was some bleeding and she had two huge claw marks on the back of her head. Now, before Ava goes out, she checks to see if there are birds in the sky. There needs to be a cull.’
There is little chance of that happening. The red kite is protected, meaning anyone killing the birds faces up to six months in jail.
No one can deny the beauty of these birds of prey (Latin name Milvus milvus) — or the original good intentions of those who revived the fortunes of a creature that was nearly wiped out in the Fifties.
But, as the air darkens over the Chilterns with flocks of kites, it’s hard to ignore the fact the balance of nature has been artificially shifted in their favour. The green lobby’s desire to rewild the country has led to a host of unintended consequences — of which the villagers of Stokenchurch are the victims.
Reports are rife in the area of kites snatching sausages from barbecues and nabbing chocolate bars, puncturing villagers’ hands as they do so. In Chris’s Cafe, a gamekeeper, who didn’t want to be named, said a red kite snatched a sandwich from his 15-year-old daughter in nearby Watlington, scratching her hand.
TWo weeks ago, in Stokenchurch’s allotments, Brenda Kerr, 70, was attacked by a red kite as she was looking for a ball of wool in a box. As she held up the lid with her hand, the red kite came swooping in.
‘It was like being hit with a metal bar,’ she says. ‘It pecked me between the fingers and left a claw mark down a finger. The blood was draining down my hand.’
‘A friend said his wife was in the garden when a red kite dropped a chicken carcass on her head. Another friend had two pieces of meat taken from his barbecue. I’d be careful about eating outdoors now. And I don’t feed my cat outside.’ Brenda has noticed her cat no longer lies on open ground, but takes shelter by the wall next to her bungalow on the edge of Stokenchurch. She has also seen a decline in songbirds.
‘People feed the red kites,’ she says. ‘That’s the trouble. You get groups of 15 or 20 in the sky. They’ve lost their fear. “They’re wonderful,” everyone says. But there were never supposed to be so many of them here in the first place.’
The red kites have traditionally fed on carrion — dead livestock and roadkill. And, indeed, they can still be seen flying along the local roads, on the search for dead animals. Recently, 60 red kites were spotted in the Reading area, hovering over roadkill. The gamekeeper in Chris’s Cafe once counted 112 red kites circling over a single nearby field.
More and more, though, the kites see human communities as a rich source of food.
While driving along the road from High Wycombe, you see the odd red kite in the sky. By the time you get to the middle of Stokenchurch, you get used to flocks of ten or 20 quartering the air above you, whistling as they go, before dropping down to street level, when they eye some prey or a villager with a plate of meat scraps.
The gamekeeper says they’ll eat anything: bread, cake, even the pasta he leaves out for his chickens. And, it must be said, many of the Stokenchurch residents do feed the red kites, so delighted are they by the sight of the birds soaring overhead.
‘The red kites have got braver and there are more of them,’ says Marleen King, 44, from Stokenchurch, who works in sales. ‘They can be scary when they swoop down in front of you. People do encourage them by feeding them. ‘And I’d be careful when eating outside, particularly with meat, which is what they’re after.’
The explosion in the number of red kites is a recent phenomenon. The birds were plentiful in the Middle Ages — in Shakespeare’s play, The Winter’s Tale, the character Autolycus says, ‘When the kite builds, look to your lesser linen,’ referring to the birds stealing washing during the nesting season.
But their population collapsed as they were hunted under vermin laws and by the mid-20th century, they were down to a few pairs in South Wales.
over the past 30 years, however, there has been a spectacularly successful breeding programme in Scotland and England.
As early as 1903, the first Kite Committee was formed to revive the bird’s population, making it the subject of the longest continuous conservation project in the world.
More recently, Scottish Natural Heritage, Natural England the RSPB have fought on behalf of the red kite. Between 1989 and 1994, more than 90 red kites from Spain were released in the Chilterns, and they have flourished. By 2002, 139 pairs were breeding in the area. Indeed, they were such successful breeders that 94 red kites from the Chilterns were released in the Derwent Valley in North-East England between 2004 and 2006.
By 2012, there were thought to be up to 1,000 red kites in the Thames Valley, the broader area of southern England that stretches beyond the Chilterns. Today, there are around 1,800 breeding pairs in Britain — about half in Wales, with the rest in Scotland and England.
Now you can see the red kites everywhere round here, floating over the beech woods and the M40 motorway, where they like to drift on the thermals that rise from the Tarmac. In 2006, a red kite made it to London, at the other end of the M40.
The boom in their population is symptomatic of the wider ‘rewilding’ movement — a desire to return Britain to a golden, pre-industrial age, and revive lost or near-extinct species. Beavers, once ruthlessly hunted for their coats, have been reintroduced to Knapdale and are breeding on the River otter in Devon.
The Lynx UK Trust wants to bring Europe’s third largest predator back to Britain.
There are even calls to bring back the wolf to the Highlands after it disappeared from Britain in the 18th century. But the problem with these aspirations — as the villagers of Stokenchurch know all too well — is that they fail to take account of the modern balance of nature, which has developed in the absence of these animals. The environment in which these creatures once thrived is now much changed and far more urbanised.
Today’s fragile natural harmony is then further disturbed by the protection of certain animals, which prevent farmers or hunters from carrying out culls.
JUST as with the booming badger population — also protected, leading, many say, to the rise in bovine TB — protection of a species leads to unintended consequences.An increase in just one species, such as the red kite, can bring a decline in various populations of farmland birds, such as skylarks.
The protection of hen harriers on grouse moors has led to a decline not only in grouse numbers, but also in wild birds such as the golden plover, ring ouzel, wheatear, dunlin and lapwing.
The 40,000 pairs of protected sparrowhawks in the country are estimated to get through 2,166 tons of wild birds a year — the equivalent of 88.2 million sparrows.
Even seagulls remain protected, further contributing to their rising numbers and widespread complaints about gull attacks.
In one notorious incident, gulls in Honiton, Devon, killed a Chihuahua puppy that was playing in a garden.
Red kites, too, can attack dogs. In 2012, one swooped down on a fiveyear-old dog in Maidenhead, Berkshire. It tried to lift it with its talons, but the 4½lb dog proved too heavy and the bird dropped it.
‘Rewilding is nonsense,’ says Robin Page, a farmer, writer and countryside expert.
‘I like red kites but I like one or two of them. To keep the population in balance, you should decide on a certain number and then dismantle their nests to control the population.
‘Conservationists are quiet on the subject. It’s a form of political correctness.
‘They talk about the success of the return of the red kite — they don’t talk about the red kite killing hares and skylarks. The answer is to control them.’
But as long as the red kite remains protected, the villagers, and dogs, of Stokenchurch are going to have to stay on the look-out when they come swooping in, talons at the ready.