Windsor Berkshire

After an absense of several hundred years Red Kites are back. At 1.30 pm today Windsor resident Nicola Brown reported a large bird of prey with the familiar forked tail and wingspan close to 2 metres circling over the Dedworth Road.

Red Kites were once regarded as vermin and were persecuted from the late middle ages until the nineteenth century when the last English Red Kites were killed by humans. However a small colony survived in Wales and a breeding program and reintroduction sceme has proved amazingly successful.

The bird seen of Windsor today was almost certainly from the Chiltern hills where there is now a large and ever growing population of these stately birds, taking advantage of the thermal currents coming off the hillsides.

Although large and impressive, Kites mainly scavenge on dead animals, small mammals and invertebrates such as beetles and earthworms.

Labels: bird spotting, red kite

This morning I was up at the Jubilee River behind Eton Wick and saw a pair of Little Ringed Plovers and a Lapwing.

Labels: bird spotting, lapwing, plover, windsor