Hello everyone! With both lambing time and nesting season fast approaching, now seems a good opportunity to give you an update on the red kites. We had a better winter, weather-wise than in previous years and we enjoyed views of a great many kites each day. In addition there were a few unexpected visitors. Several buzzards, most likely juveniles searching for a territory, moved into the area a couple of months ago and were coming in for the feed. The territorial pair that nest in the feeding zone tolerated the interlopers for a while but have now chased them off to clear the way for their own chicks this year. We have also been visited by a Canada goose which came down to the food a couple of weeks ago. Whether or not the kites would be pleased if the goose became a regular visitor remains to be seen. The largest visitor by far has been a sea eagle. This juvenile male has returned to the farm on several occasions. We could tell it was him each time by looking at his wing-tags - both are red and have the letter T upon them. As you can see from the picture below, of him flying alongside a buzzard, he fairly dwarfs the other birds in the area!
Thanks to Andy Gunderson for the photo.
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Building an osprey platform
A 2012 chick caught on camera
While it appears that we may be set for a late spring this year, many of the Red Kites in central Scotland have been busy nest-building and some are already incubating their eggs. Soon all of the breeding pairs will disperse to their own nest sites, leaving only those that nest locally and any juvenile kites that are in the area coming in to our daily feed. Although this means that over Spring and Summer we don’t see the same large numbers of kites that we do in Autumn and Winter, there are several reasons to look forward to this time of year. The kites that nest locally have to be very pro-active in finding food to take back to the chicks in the nest. This means that we get to see these birds coming and going with food throughout the afternoon - not only to collect meat to feed their young with but also returning to fill their own stomachs. We will also have our CCTV nestcamera up and running soon, relaying live footage of a nearby kite nest to our visitor centre. (This will be the third year we’ve been filming this breeding pair of kites. Each of the previous two years, they have built their nests in different trees, forcing us to shift the camera. We hope that this year they will stay put but with kites nothing is guaranteed... (The problems of working with nature!) Still, we very much look forward to following the progress of the young kites from the moment they hatch to the point where they’ll fledge their nests. If you happen to be in the area over spring/summertime, we highly recommend that you come and see the footage! Oddly, the latest and most exciting project that we have been working on has nothing to do with the kites. In the last month we built two artificial osprey nests on the farm. Experts from the RSPB advised us that although there are no large bodies of water on the farm itself, we are sufficiently close to a few that, were we to build these nests, we may have reasonable hope of attracting the birds in the future. The process of building an osprey platform involves a lot of hard work. First the canopy of a suitable tree has to
be sawn off. (The pictures above will give you some idea of how hard this is, given that the trees were roughly 30 metres tall!) Next a wooden pallet or mesh basket has to be placed at the top of the tree. Finally, our tree climbers had to cover these with both turf and sticks. Below is a picture of the finished nest.
It would be overly hopeful to expect the ospreys to find the nests this year, so soon after they’ve been built, however you never can tell what will happen! Well that’s about all the major news from here. All that remains to be said is we hope to see you in the near future, either during nesting season or when the chicks fledge the nest at the end of the Summer. Last year was a record year for our chick numbers (101 fledged in central Scotland) so we very much hope for another great season and many excellent days’ kite viewing at Argaty. Kind regards,
Lynn, Niall, Mike and Tom
More regular updates on the Red Kites can be found on our Facebook page: http://www.facebook.com/argaty. redkites#!/argaty.redkites