John Lewis-Stempel tells the story of London’s rocky relationship with the red kite, in this extract from his new book, England: A Natural History

A late-season skylark was trilling above the ‘laund’ on the gentle slope below the ponds, a song of territory in more ways than one, for there are areas of the park set aside for the bird, where humans and dogs are barred.

Suddenly, the burning August sun was blotted out. The lark’s singing over the prairie of tussocky grassland ceased, button-pushed. It became twilight at midday, and for a second the park shrank and held its breath. Red kites cast a giant, chill shadow; their wingspan can reach nearly two metres. And then a single and singularly brave jackdaw rose up from the bordering oaks and began to mob the fork-tailed raptor in a pas de deux choreographed long ago when the land was young. Finally, the jackdaw and the kite disappeared into white altitudes inhabited by the aircraft from Heathrow.

The story of the red kite in London, indeed England, is the story of loss and return. Red kites were common in medieval and early modern London, when they fed on scraps and refuse as unofficial feathered street cleaners. John Taylor, the celebrated seventeenth-century ‘Water Poet’ wrote: ‘Ravens, kites, crows, and many other birds of prey, are tolerated to live unhurt, not for any good that is in themselves, but because they do good offices in devouring and carrying away our garbage.’

Less popular was the penchant of the kite for brazen robbery. The naturalist William Turner (1509/10–1568) wrote in a letter printed in Gessner’s Historia animalium, 1555:

Such is the daring of our kites, that they often dare to take bread from children, fish from women, and cloths from hedges and from the hands of men. Indeed, very often they will take the hats from people’s heads during the time when they are nesting.

Shakespeare referred to a kite’s other infamous habit, nicking washing from the line, in The Winter’s Tale when Autolycus, the street-smart conman, warns: ‘When the kite builds, look to lesser linen.’ The nest of a red kite is an untidy affair, often built on top of an old crow’s nest. It is lined with sheep’s wool and decorated with all manner of objects like paper, plastic and cloth.

The red kite in London was undone by urbanity. Improvement in waste disposal and the felling of trees deprived Milvus milvus of its niche in the London ecosystem, and by the end of the eighteenth century it was extinct as an urban breeding bird. There was also persecution; as well as stealing linen, the kites preyed upon backyard poultry. ‘For which cause,’ wrote the ornithologist John Ray (1627–1705), ‘our good Housewives are very angry with them, and of all birds hate and curse them most.’ The last sighting on the streets of the capital was in 1859.

Outside London, the bird was shot and poisoned by gamekeepers who feared the bird would harm their animals and birds. (Kites are uniquely vulnerable to persecution; while red kites do catch small mammals and earthworms, scavenging for carrion forms a large part of their diet, making them easy to kill using dead animals laced with poison.) Kites were also killed for taxidermy, and the Victorian fascination for egg collecting further reduced their numbers.

By the middle of the nineteenth century the red kite was extinct in England, Scotland and Ireland. Only a small population remained, hidden away in the hills of mid-Wales. (A study of red kite DNA in 1997 determined that the population in Wales may have had just one successfully breeding female at one point.)

In 1903, a small group of naturalists formed the Kite Committee, beginning the longest continuous conservation project in history. Even so, the population was extremely slow to recover, with only fifty-two known red kite nests in Wales in 1989. In that same year, Milvus milvus was reintroduced into England and Scotland by the Nature Conservancy Council and the RSPB using ninety-three birds from Sweden and Spain.

The first English breeding took place in 1992 and the population has boomed, especially in the Chiltern Hills north west of London, their wooded slopes making desirable breeding territory. The bird is now a daily sight in the capital. As is the raven, which has recolonized London without reintroduction; before recolonization the last record of a wild raven nesting in London is from 1777. The celebrated black birds of the Tower of London are, of course, captive charges.

This is and extract from England: A Natural History (Transworld, £25) by John Lewis-Stempel. Buy a copy from bookshop.org here.

Or buy a copy from Blackwell’s here.

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