About red kites

This magnificently graceful bird of prey is unmistakable with its reddish-brown body, angled wings and deeply forked tail. Their wing span is roughly 1.8 - 2 metres. From below, the under-wings are brown with prominent white patches. The tail is forked and from below can appear almost translucent against the sky. Often hangs on the rising air, using its tail as a rudder. Circles and weaves in slow, effortless flight with wings slightly bowed.

Feeding

Red kites have an incredibly varied diet, taking whatever is most easily available locally. You'll often see them over the road, as they know this is a good place to find dead rabbits and other road kill. Though carrion eaters (things that are already dead) in the main, they will also eat invertebrates, small birds and mammals and will steal from other birds of prey or scavengers such as crows.

This scavenging behaviour makes kites susceptible to taking illegal poisoned bait that has been put out for foxes, crows and rats. Guidelines which help prevent accidental poisonings taking place are available.

Habits and behaviour

When a red kite starts its life, it's likely that he (or she) will share the nest with one or maybe two other eggs and, on occasion, there might even be three other eggs in the nest. To begin with, they are kept warm by their mum, who sits on them for roughly four weeks until they finally hatch.

At this stage, the little chicks are covered in fluff and still need their mum to keep them warm. If they were left on their own, they'd quickly get cold and probably wet and would sadly die. Both the mum and the dad red kite bring the chicks food and after about eight or ten weeks, the fluffy chicks have gained their grown up feathers and are ready to leave the nest.

For the first two or three years, the red kite wanders about having a tour of the countryside. Only once they reach they age of two or three, they decide it is time to settle down and make a nest of their own.

The places kites like most are woods, and even better if that wood is near open farmland. They build their nest from twigs and line it with grasses and tufts of sheep's wool. Depending on what's around, they sometimes will use all sorts of things to line their nest like black silage wrap, shopping bags, old newspapers, tea towels and maybe even peoples' clothing - pinched from a washing line. The kites will then settle down to rear their own brood of chicks, hatching maybe two, three and sometimes even four eggs.

Every year in Spring, if both the male and female red kite survive, they will renew their bond and rear another lot of chicks. Red kites can live well into their teens, some even make it into their twenties.