The silhouette is back, and the hairs go up. Not fear. Just the feeling of being appraised by something having a long, aloof look. For some reason our garden has found its place on the morning scrutiny round of this magnificent thing. You can see why it got its name: the kite part, I mean. I’ve seen it more than any other bird of prey, so its movements are familiar. That shallow “M” of the wings, splay-tail like a mermaid’s, and that strange flight, too slow, wobbling on a spindly axis. It could briefly be a buzzard, then it drops a little, as if sliding down a wire, and you realise it’s bigger than it seems. I’ve seen it sometimes as low as the trees. Sometimes high, in a pair. Once I spotted its shadow first, patrolling the grass.
My four-year-old son spots it – once “the scary pigeon”, now just the red kite. “Is the red kite red?” he asks me. It’s a good question. To us it’s black. Anonymous, like type against the sky. Sometimes when it’s high the light catches the underside of its wings and you see the white flashes there; or when it’s low and banks, you see that plumage.
It is an extraordinarily beautiful bird. A head of pale blue tattering to a hood above bronze plumage, with a yellow beak that hooks black. Those eyes, were you lucky enough to get close, are cloud-pale and sharp with a full-stop pupil.
Once, the red kite was better known as the dead kite. Like vultures, they suffer for being smart. The red kite was hunted to death for being vermin in England and Scotland in the 19th century. Its reintroduction in the 1990s was a triumph; those poisoning it today have to do it quietly. Or accidentally, whilst trying to illegally kill something else. Here I see dozens in a week. It’s always a thrill. Not just the bird, but its implication.
That’s why the hairs go up. A little tingle of watchful threat, that reminder that just because humans are smart enough to slight nature, we shouldn’t. We too are under a gaze that doesn’t care what we are.
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