WEEK IN WALES

I spent the last few days in South Wales with my good friend Marc Hughes, working near Carmarthen. On my way to South Wales, I stopped at Frampton on Severn Boating Lake in Gloucestershire, where I enjoyed great views of 11 Little Gulls.

Frampton on Severn Boating Lake

It’s great to see these birds migrating; spring has arrived!

A Black Swan was present as well

Over the next few days, while working, Mark and I enjoyed great views of a Goshawk, Red Kite, and several migrants, including Willow Warblers, Sand Martins, and Swallows.

Red Kite

The moth trap was set up during our stay, enabling me to add a few more species to my list, and I also spotted my first Peacock butterfly of the year.

Peacock

Water Carpet

Twin-Spotted Quaker

On my way home, I stopped at Devil's Bridge. I hadn't been there since I was a child, on September 19, 1981, with my father, who has since passed away. It was quite emotional to stand there in the valley and watch the Red Kites flying around. This site was the last stronghold of the Red Kite in the British Isles. 

 

The Red Kite was once a common bird across the whole of Britain. In the early 15th century, it made such a contribution to public health by scavenging carrion from the streets of London that it was made a capital offence to kill one - the first conservation law not solely concerned to protect hunting rights. But within not much more than two centuries, the bounty was on the kites' heads, not its hunters'. They were persecuted for taking game birds and, bizarrely, for stealing washing to ornament their nests. (Autolycus in The Winter's Tale, himself "a snapper-up of unconsidered trifles", warns that "When the kite builds, look to your lesser linen.") The scale of the slaughter was enormous. For example, the Churchwarden's accounts in the village of Tenterden, Kent, records the killing of 432 red kites in just 14 years from 1677. With the spread of keepered shooting estates in the late 18th and 19th centuries, it's no wonder the bird was driven into extinction in England and Scotland, and clung on only in the wild but less bloodthirsty hills of central Wales.

In the Fifties, a group of committed Welshmen formed the Kite Committee and was able to nudge the population up from a dozen or so pairs to about 100 by the beginning of the Nineties. However, their expansion was laboriously slow, and there was some evidence that genetic interbreeding was a contributory factor. There certainly seemed little likelihood of their ever repopulating their old haunts over the border. So, in the late Eighties, the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds and the then Nature Conservancy Council set up a UK Red Kite Project Team to consider reintroducing the bird to England and Scotland, with nestlings from the large populations in Sweden and Spain. One of the release areas was in northern Scotland, and another was in the Chilterns. The number of birds set free into the wild is doing extremely well.

A great week away with Marc and some good birds added to the year list.