Tollie Red Kites
My friend volunteers with the RSPB’s Tollie Red Kite nature reserve so she took us to watch the daily feed. It was really cool to see these birds as they’re not very common in the UK, so I had only ever seen them in Germany. I wish I could have gotten some better pictures, but this is about as good as my camera can do at a distance. Red kites are classed as “near threatened” by the IUCN red list, suffering from persecution by livestock owners. Large birds that hunt and scavenge around farmland, they are often assumed to be a threat to lambs, however, they are fairly weak and can’t really tackle prey larger than a rabbit. In fact, one of their more common prey items is earthworms! By the 1980s they had completely gone from Scotland and England, with only a failing population left in Wales. These birds are a result of a reintroduction program that used birds from Sweden, Spain and Germany to start populations across the UK, with the hope being that they would meet up as the po
