Another amazing insight into the life of these incredible Red Kites from Adam
"Just over a year ago, in September 2011, I got a phone call from a birdwatcher who had seen a red kite on a large estate in County Antrim. He already had permission to birdwatch on the estate, but even better news was that the gamekeeper was happy to meet up and show me where the bird had been seen.
On meeting up with the birder and ‘keeper, and despite a couple of false alarms, caused by passing buzzards, we unfortunately didn’t manage to see the kite on the morning I visited.
Thankfully though, the birdwatcher had his camera with him on the day he saw the bird and was able to get some photographs of the bird in flight. We were able to zoom in on the photograph which clearly showed wing-tags which were light blue on the left wing and white on the right.
This colour combination immediately told me that this was a kite from the kite project by our partner, the Golden Eagle Trust and also that it was a juvenile bird i.e. born in 2011. Following up with Marc Ruddock, my counterpart in the south, it turned out to be a bird which was released at Newbridge Demesne, north Dublin at the end of July.
Pale blue/white B7 (PWB7) stayed around the estate for several weeks before disappearing, only for me to re-sight it at the end of September when it turned up at a site near Castlewellan, where it was feeding on worms in a recently reseeded field along with a couple of buzzards and several Northern Irish kites.
PWB7 remained in south County Down throughout the winter and as the spring sunshine began to warm the countryside, it felt it was time to experience life in yet another Northern Irish county and decided to move west into south County Armagh!
The bird appeared to be settled near Poyntzpass, where it was recorded regularly throughout the spring and summer, but as the days have shortened and we’ve moved into autumn, PWB7 has once again moved back over towards Castlewellan where I saw it feeding on worms and beetles on a recently slurried field near Leitrim last week.
Monitoring is a major part of the project and information on movements like this is not only fascinating, it also provides us with vital insight and understanding of these wonderful birds, information which we would not be able to get if the birds weren’t fitted with wing-tags."
Great to learn more about these wonderful birds, keep up to date on and facebook and Twitter we'll hear from Adam again in the New Year, in the meantime keep posted here for more information on community fundraising...