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!”

That some creatures we commonly see, creatures that share this planet with us, can lift into the air and soar hundreds or thousands of feet above us, is surely a marvel we take too easily for granted. But they are so different from us, creatures of another dimension. We fly, yes, but contained in machines, or suspended from draperies, balloons, parachutes, hang-gliders, micro-lights. Not the same at all, as free flight, rising from the earth and taking wing.

Anyway, that morning of the display I refer to, a grandson and I were sipping cuppas at the kitchen door in bright sunlight when six kites, a family, swooped over the roof behind us, shadows on the lawn, and we looked up to see the adults soaring skyward above the juveniles and then, at an apex, falling and, locking talons as they fell, spiralling earthwards like (as Stanley, the grandson, so well described it) “sycamore helicopters” or samaras, to separate and lift again from about 10m above the grass.

And, an hour later, as I stood at the same spot, I caught a flash out of the corner of my eye and swinging my head around was in time to see a sparrowhawk seize a sparrow as it dashed into the garden hedge for cover. Too late for the sparrow. The hawk, a female, alighted on the lawn 30ft away, standing on its prey. I had the camera. I should have pressed the video, but didn’t. However, I got some snaps. A sparrowhawk, with a cock sparrow. Not an everyday sight.

From England to Ibiza, where I walked along a strip of beach at San Antonio, the foam disco capital, as was, where every second holiday-maker sports a large tattoo, and the girls from the north of England sport half-assed shorts over fat bottoms, sometimes pink.

On that afternoon, England was playing Wales in the soccer, and across the road that fringed the beach, crowds were roaring in unison in all the bars, “England!, England!!, England!!! England!!!!” while a few bullfrogs croaked at the highest volume they could muster in a clump of reeds 8m square between road and beach, an area which had somehow survived all development and where their ancestors may had lived since the dawn of time: frogs evolved circa 120m years ago.

So, there they were, croaking away, now in competition with football supporters chanting “England!” in Lineker’s Bar, Ibiza, presumably owned by Gary Lineker, the football star. I was unhappy upon seeing a football supporter nip across the road to discharge some of his processed beer into the frogs’ small reed patch: perhaps the services were crowded in the bar.

The noise was deafening. I was glad to escape to the divine peace of a friend’s home a mile off-road among the olive trees and pines in the north of the island.

The following day, in a San Antonio park, I viewed a small, elegant bronze horse sculpted by Barry Flanagan, resident in Ibiza for years (and, when younger, living the hippy life in an old VW van) and whose bronzes of leaping hares and drummer boys are exhibited all over the world.

Son of an Irish set designer, he was born in Wales; but it is not for that that his sculptures are exhibited at the Irish Museum of Modern Art and elsewhere in Ireland. It is for the joyous, exuberant beauty of the things.