A Sky Full of Kites

A Rewilding Story

Tom Bowser

• Publisher: Birlinn
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN: 9781780276502
• eBook ISBN: 9781788852852
• Topic: Biological Sciences
• Subtopic: Zoology
• Index: Biological Sciences

Shortlisted for the Saltire Society First Book of the Year Award Red kites were once Britain's most common bird of prey. By the early 1900s they'd been wiped out in Scotland and England following centuries of ruthless persecution. When some reintroduced kites began roosting on their 1, 400-acre farm at Argaty in Perthshire, Tom Bowser's parents, Lynn and Niall, decided to turn their estate into a safe haven. They began feeding the birds and invited the world to come and see them, learn about them and fall in love with them. A Sky Full of Kites is the story of the Argaty Red Kite project, and the re-establishing of these magnificent raptors to Scotland, but it is also much more than that. Ill at ease with the traditional rural values of livestock farming, Lynn and Niall's son Tom, who returned to work on the farm after a career in journalism, reveals his passion for nature and his desire to dedicate his family's land to conservation.

Breaking Through

7

New Year

Advancing civilization has done its work with the kites, as with all other destructive animals, and driven it far away from human habitations. Man chooses to be the only destructive animal within his domain and, eagle-like, permits no inferior to poach on his territory.

Elgin Courant & Morayshire Advertiser,

31 August 1860

The winter of 2017–18 was the harshest I’ve ever known. Snow followed rain, rain followed snow. Pining, skeletal deer shuffled around the frozen estate, searching in vain for a bite to eat. Several died. Some I chopped up for the kites, others I left for the foxes and crows. Buzzards succumbed to the elements, too. I’d find them in the fields and woods, their bodies so thin that their breast bones jutted out like Adam’s apples.

The field around the kite hide is filled with rowans, hazels and thorny bushes which provide food and shelter for small birds. With help from the local RSPB members’ group, my parents had planted them back in 2003. That was the year when they abandoned their old homemade hide and had a new one built closer to the farm. Usually these trees and shrubs have enough berries to last long into winter, but not in that everlasting cold. Each tree was picked clean, a carcass stripped of meat. I set up several bird feeders, and the starving tree sparrows, chaffinches and tits descended with delight.

As pond upon pond froze over, herons began visiting the kite feeding area. Heads bobbing to some imaginary beat they dad-danced across the grass, Bobby Charlton comb-overs blowing in the wind. Their presence drove the kites crazy. They bombarded the meat, afraid that the alien invaders would devour it all.

Thirty to forty kites normally congregate in the Argaty winter roost, but by the early weeks of 2018 the number had grown much larger and we saw more each day as the big chill continued.

Watching the birds in winter, I found myself wondering why there was no collective or communal noun for a group of kites. We have charms of goldfinch, parliaments of rooks, gaggles or skeins of geese, murders of crows. Kites roost together, fly together, find food together. They are the very definition of a communal bird, and yet nobody has seen fit to give their group a name. True, some refer to soars or kettles of kites – the term apparently referring to the birds circling together like liquid boiling in a cauldron – but these are applied to every other social raptor too. Don’t kites deserve a title of their own? It’s not as though people are unfamiliar with them. Quite the opposite is true. Songs and poems have been written about kites, the birds lent their name to the popular toy, and in Scotland the towns of Gladgate, Gladsmuir (kites’ moor) and Gledstanes (kite stones, from whence William Gladstone’s family originated) all owe their name to the birds that roosted nearby. So why no collective noun? For posterity, here are my humble submissions: a whistle of kites, a summons, a tiding, a tryst, a garland, a torque, a spiral, an eddy . . . I could go on. The point is that our ancestors weren’t short of choices.

Living in a pack is a sensible survival strategy. Winter is hard. If the ground is frozen, digging up insects is impossible; if snow is heavy, any carrion soon gets buried. Many pairs of eyes are better than one and for kites, who have slow metabolisms, sharing a meal with their mates isn’t a problem. Those birds that nest nearby tend to stay on Argaty over winter. They know there’s food here, know it makes sense to remain. They are usually the first to appear when we throw the meat out. Non-resident birds, recently returned to the communal roost, notice the locals heading purposefully towards the hide each afternoon and realise that they are queuing for a reason. Within minutes, the whole team is diving for the food. Working in this way, they help one another through the worst of the weather.

One day in early January, with the roads so thick with snow that no visitors dared drive them, Mum and I watched sixty kites skate across the frozen sky and descend. I’d never seen so many at one time. In the midst of the action, a lonely buzzard stood hunched over the meat, fighting gamely for its share. It was a youngster, searching for a territory, desperate for food in that merciless weather. I felt for it, I really did. It wouldn’t last long here. A nesting pair of buzzards patrol this spot and they don’t tolerate interlopers. Even their own offspring are forced out each year.

The young bird had been there no more than five minutes when a howl drifted down from the trees on the hill. One of the adults had spotted it.

For two more days it remained in the area. The poor thing must have been famished. Each time the kites swooped it reared up, flapping its wings to shoo them away. Then it ducked its head and gorged on the meat again. For that short period it was in heaven.

On the third day, the territorial male came. He left the trees at mid-height, passing unnoticed through the throngs of kites diving for food. At the last second his talons shot out. The collision was utterly silent and somehow more sickening for that. The youngster fell like it had been shot and lay there motionless. I watched for several minutes, convinced it was dead. At last, as I was walking over to gather it in, it dragged itself up, limped several paces from me then launched into a punch-drunk flight, disappearing from sight, never to return.

Buzzards have endured a rollercoaster ride in recent decades. By the 1960s their numbers had reached terrible lows. First they’d faced starvation after the disease myxomatosis had decimated the population of rabbits, one of their main food sources. Then widely used agricultural insecticides such as DDT hit hard. The poison travelled up the food chain, killing not only the insects but the animals that fed on them too. Ingesting even a small amount had another terrible side effect: it thinned eggshells. When the female settled down to incubate, the shell cracked beneath her weight. The poisons were subsequently banned and buzzard numbers are rebounding. Today, at an estimated 60,000 pairs, they are Britain’s most common bird of prey.

In the past few years, however, localised declines have been reported. Some are in areas where kites were reintroduced, and although the number of buzzards in Britain is more than twice the entire global kite population, many blame kites for the problem. Why, they ask, did people bring these birds back? Why are we feeding them? Surely they should be left to fend for themselves. A few go even further, suggesting that kites should be culled to redress the balance. For anyone involved in kite conservation, these questions are pertinent. If we wish to show the importance of kites to our ecosystem and prove that our work is more than some mere glory project, we ought to explore them.

Those involved in the reintroductions would say it was a moral duty to bring kites back. As Roy Dennis, the driving force behind the very first projects, recently told me, ‘I had always hankered after red kites after reading of the onslaught on them in Scotland. It was a matter of correcting a wrong. I wanted to see them flying again in their ancestral haunts and am thrilled it has been so successful.’

There are ecological reasons for the reintroductions too. Picture the time when kites were our most abundant bird and circled every inch of our countryside, feasting on carcasses wherever they found them. Think of the many wild animals roaming these lands, saved from exposure to diseases and parasites found in that decaying meat by the kites and their amazing, catholic diets. Remember the people in towns and cities who were spared from a similar fate, thanks to these birds. Imagine all of those kites flying in to roosts around the country each night, gathering in the treetops, defecating and coughing up pellets, carpeting the forest floor in an ultra-fertile mix of bone meal and manure, helping everything to grow. All of this was lost when kites were removed from our landscape.

And what of today? What role might returning kites play in our very changed countryside? Where once they saved wild animals from contact with carrion-linked diseases, kites can now save healthy sheep. When a ewe dies on a hill farm it’s a lottery as to whether the farmer will be able to find and recover the carcass. The sharp-eyed kites never miss a free meal, however. What a benefit this could be, both to the remaining healthy sheep and to our food hygiene. We should also consider the other scavengers: corvids and buzzards, badgers and foxes. These are capable hunters, and in our degraded landscape their impact on prey species can be severe. With kites back and competing for carrion, might these rivals be less prolific? Might instances of predation reduce? If the aforementioned anecdotes are anything to go by, in some areas kites are already affecting the balance. For those people used to seeing larger numbers of buzzards any recent decline may seem alarming, but nobody can say how many kites or buzzards there should be in Britain. In most areas, the only avian challenger the solitary, territorial buzzard had in the twentieth century was other buzzards. Although that might have seemed natural, it was anything but. Nature intended Britain to have scavengers co-existing, sometimes competing, but ultimately finding a balance. Beyond any moral considerations, balance is the real reason for bringing kites back. These birds help draw us closer to the healthier equilibrium we used to have.

The second question – ‘why feed kites?’ – is easier to answer. We feed them because they are scavengers. Because, deliberately or not, people have supplied much of their meat for centuries. Even if all feeding stations were abolished, kites would not simply disperse and live independently of mankind. They are not that kind of bird. Instead they would go to busy roads, railway tracks, wind farms and shooting estates, the places where we regularly kill things. And as a pack animal loyal to their territory, they would go en masse. Short of outlawing cars, trains, wind turbines and field sports, there is little we can do to change that. This being the case, surely we’d prefer to see kites at feeding stations than at those dangerous places.

That said, we must be careful not to overfeed them. These birds are opportunists. The more food you provide, the more kites will come. At Argaty we put out less than one kilogramme a day (an amount intended to replicate what they once found in the wild in the days when farmers left sheep carcasses out for the birds). Our food maintains a small population only, provided that they hunt and scavenge for their own food too. Living alongside them are buzzards, songbirds and so much more. We strike a balance. Overfeeding risks seriously upsetting that. Looked at properly, the issue is not whether or not to feed kites, but how much to feed them.

The final question – ‘ought we to cull kites to redress the imbalances they’ve created?’ – is the one that requires the most in-depth response, for it takes us to the heart of Britain’s wildlife crisis. The truth is that kites have not created an imbalance. Instead they have entered an unbalanced world. While at places like ours – traditional old estates with plenty of trees, untamed areas, hedgerows and ponds – they have slotted back in with minimal trouble, that isn’t the case across all of Britain because so much of our countryside is no longer wild. Although we have been altering this landscape (and impacting wildlife) for most of our existence – felling trees, draining wetlands, hunting and killing our way through the centuries – since the Second World War agriculture has intensified to previously unimaginable scales and we have changed the countryside hugely. Now we have so little habitat, so few unkempt places where nature can thrive. This is what creates conflict between species.

A major cause of our problems is the UK population, which has risen from around 49 million people in 1945 to over 66 million today. Much of that growth came in England, where there are nearly twice as many people as there were at the start of the twentieth century. Despite our small land mass, our little island now has the third-highest population in Europe. Eurostat, the EU’s statistical office, claim that if the trend continues by 2050 we’ll have the highest. The pressure this puts on our countryside may not be immediately apparent. Only 17 per cent of Britons live in rural areas, and more than 70 per cent of our landmass is farmland. Our population may be growing, but it is not eating into our countryside, at least not in a direct way. There is still plenty of space where nature could, in theory, flourish. Our hungry mouths bite in other ways, though. Because our population is growing we must farm hard, simply to feed people. To make matters worse, as a society we’ve also become wasteful. Every year 25–30 per cent of UK farm produce ends up uneaten in the bin, and we farm our best land all the harder to cater for this waste, spraying more weeds, applying more artificial fertiliser, flogging it until it has nothing left to give.

For decades, European agricultural subsidies have exacerbated these issues. The aim of these annual payments was noble enough. They encouraged our farmers to produce and allowed us to compete with the New World Order – countries like Australia and New Zealand, who were already operating intensively, on vast scales, and driving down prices. If our farmers had charged according to the cost of production, we’d have been priced out, but with the government making up the shortfall, our produce could also be sold at what supermarkets deemed ‘fair prices’. Food should be both plentiful and affordable for all. Subsidies made that possible.

But the system had unintended consequences. First farmers were supported per head of livestock they owned. With farm gate value reducing and production costs increasing they overstocked simply to claim subsidy and, often, to survive. An overabundance of food was produced and much of it was, inevitably, wasted. In attempt to tackle these issues, policy was rewritten and farmers were instead paid for every farmable acre they owned. Suddenly it didn’t matter if you actually had any livestock; you were paid simply for having a farm. And the bigger the farm, the better, the more money you claimed. For other farmers, these changes were a death knell. They could no longer make anything of their small patch of land and gave up.

The wild animals that had evolved for centuries alongside those people were suddenly abandoned. The best land was bought up, the small farms swallowed up by bigger ones. Men with spades arrived and planted the poor ground with foreign trees. A few hardy birds and mammals clung on; the others dwindled.

Across Britain, livestock numbers have dropped each year, but because farmers have to keep land in farmable condition in order to receive those vital payments, wildlife populations have not risen. They couldn’t. The habitat simply wasn’t there for them.

Today woodland covers only 13 per cent of the UK’s land area. The European average is 37 per cent. We have 500,000 miles of hedgerow now; less than half of what we had before the Second World War. Gone are 97 per cent of the wildflower meadows and 90 per cent of the wetlands we had in the 1930s. According to the 2013 State of Nature report, 56 per cent of Britain’s species declined between 1970 and 2013, with 40 per cent of that total showing moderate to strong declines. Of farmland birds, we’ve seen a 54 per cent decline, with 12 per cent threatened with extinction. Among 218 countries whose biodiversity was measured using the Biological Intactness Index, Britain ranked 189th.

We needn’t remain in this mess. Marginal land could easily be taken out of production. We could restore and repair habitats. But for so long the system has encouraged us to sit back and watch the decline. In this brave new world so many of us benefitted. The farmers that could go with the changes were paid; they stayed in business, kept on fa...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Map of Argaty
• Foreword
• Preface
• Introduction
• New Beginnings
• Breaking Through
• What Next?
• Epilogue
• Postscript
• Thanks
• Select Reading
• Plates