It emerges from somewhere in the bare oak branches above with the slow, sliding grace of an airship. Within moments it has taken its place high in the huge midwinter sky, which today is hectic with rowdy winds, long trains of cumulus and meteoric bursts of sunshine.
Red kites are Britain’s most graceful gliders. This one appears to balance effortlessly in the energetic air, its forked tail twisting, but its wide wings almost still. Sometimes they seem not quite of this world. The bird is aggressively mobbed by loud, restive crows, but it drifts through them with a characteristic zen-like detachment, literally unflappable.
On the surface, the environs of the Washburn Valley seem an appropriate home for these unhurried birds. It always feels to me like a blissful backwater, where the surging current of the world seems to slacken. But this is not quite the sweet home that it looks.
Red kites were introduced in 1999 at the nearby Harewood Estate by the Doug Simpson-led Yorkshire Red Kites project. Doug remembers collecting three of the first birds he radio-tagged, victims of illegal poisoned bait, but since then the Yorkshire population has grown to self-sustaining levels, with probably more than 100 breeding pairs in 2015, raising more than 180 young.
Red kites are a regular sight in the suburbs of Leeds, and even the city centre, giving a glimpse of the otherworldly to people commuting or gazing from the kitchen window.
But individual birds remain under threat. Based on cases where the cause of death was established, according to the Yorkshire Red Kites project, the area roughly cornered by Leathley, Blubberhouses and Denton, including large parts of the Washburn Valley, is the Bermuda Triangle for red kites, with possibly the worst record of poisoning in England. The overall population has spread as far as the southern Wolds, about 50 miles to the east, but these badlands have arrested their progress to just a few miles to the north-west.
It would seem that on the local grouse moors, some lying within an “area of outstanding natural beauty”, large tracts of land are rendered inhospitable for these most beautiful forms of life.
