Red kites are back in the wild

NEWBRIDGE House, a fine 18th Century mansion in north County Dublin, was the ancestral home of the Cobbe family, whose ranks included an archbishop and a Lord Lieutenant.

A ‘cob’ being a male swan, the family crest featured two swans walking the road of life with the motto Moriens cano [dying I sing], appearing underneath: Aristotle thought swans sang before dying. Now, however, Newbridge has a new ornithological connection.

The estate, with its 154 hectares of forest and farmland, was acquired by Fingal County Council, who opened a Regional Park there in 1986. The house can be visited, there’s a walled garden and a fine adventure playground. At the ‘traditional farm’, children encounter piglets, kid goats and foals. Eggs are hatched in incubators. Coaches and old farm machinery are displayed. Newbridge attracts children from far and wide but, this summer, there were other junior visitors; 26 red kite chicks, taken from nests in Wales.

The birds were housed in specially constructed pens and hand-fed, care being taken to ensure that they didn’t become too accustomed to people. Ringed and wing-tagged for identification in the field, they were released to the wild last week. Yesterday, these magnificent raptors, with their swallow-shaped tails, could be seen circling over the woodlands bordering the estate.

Another 13 young kites are taking to the air in Wicklow around now, bringing to a conclusion the Red Kite Reintroduction Programme which began in 2007. The project, organised by the Golden Eagle Trust, is supported by the National Parks and Wildlife Service and the Heritage Council. In 2007, the first 30 Welsh chicks were brought to Wicklow with batches arriving each year since. In all, 160 birds have been introduced. A similar programme is being carried out in County Down. Up to this year, the releases were in Wicklow and Down. The birds taking wing at Newbridge, half-way between the two locations, should ensure that two isolated populations don’t develop and that we’ll have a continuous, genetically diverse, distribution of kites all along the east coast.

The birds introduced in previous years have paired, established territories and many have bred successfully. According to Dr Mark Ruddock of the Golden Eagle Trust, 19 youngsters fledged from Wicklow nests last year. Rats and young magpies are the chief prey items which the parent birds have been feeding to their young. Although kites are beneficial to farmers and landowners generally, old prejudices die hard; several of the introduced kites have been poisoned.

Long ago, this bird was found throughout much of these islands. It even frequented the heart of London where it scavenged for titbits around food markets, visited dumps and killed the mice and rats which were everywhere. From the late 18th century onwards, cities became cleaner and kites, regarded as vermin, were trapped, poisoned and shot into extinction. Game-keepers killed anything they thought posed a threat to young pheasants and partridges.

Relentless persecution rendered kites extinct everywhere except for a small area of the Wye Valley in Wales. There, a dwindling population lingered on. Then a new threat emerged — the egg collector. By 1900, only four Welsh pairs remained and ornithologists were forced to take a drastic step. To outwit the collectors they removed the eggs from the few remaining nests, replacing them with false ones. The eggs were hatched under a tame buzzard and the babies returned to their parents. The desperate measure paid off. By 1978, the number of Welsh pairs had reached 38. Now, there are several hundred.

A DNA analyses, carried out in Nottingham in the 1970s, showed that the entire Welsh population was descended from a single female; evidently kite numbers can recover from a very small base if all their other needs are met. Survival rates in Ireland, so far, have been good. Hopes are high that the red kite will, from now on, be a familiar sight in Irish skies.

Well done to the organisations and individuals whose dedication made this possible.