Red kites, not in sunset, but spectacular

THE sky over the children’s playground in a park behind my daughter’s house at Rickmansworth, Hertfordshire, was full of kites. Not box kites or fighting kites but red kites, birds now as commonplace as the rook over the gardens and streets of her neighbourhood.

They are enormous, gorgeous birds, wingspans almost 2m; plumage russet red, broad; triangular tails deeply forked; wings slim and long, bronze, then white, then tipped with black feather splayed like a hands. So novel for me was the presence of such large and beautiful birds so close to human habitation that I had to try photographing them. Inevitably, I was too late to catch the image as a bird suddenly come wheeling over the roof behind me, swung over the lawn and lofted over the trees beyond. Of disappearing kites, I have many pictures.

As good luck would have it, I didn’t have the camera to hand when the most spectacular visit occurred. Uninterested in recording images, I simply watched, enthralled, a display so dramatic that it would set any human heart racing, however urbane. As Gerard Manley Hopkins said of the kestrel “. . .the achieve of; the mastery of the thing!”