An afternoon at Bwlch Nant yr Arian ...... with a few red kites.

Super captures Clare, great detail, must have been exciting to see live action ... is the YL gull a rarity?

WendyBartter said:

is the YL gull a rarity?

It's not something I see very often and it was a bonus to see it in action!  I don't know if they are a regular sighting in that part of the world.

Lovely photo captures Clare and must have been an amazing site to see all the Kites coming in for the food; well done too with the YL gull, a bonus !

I have mixed feelings about the Kite feeding stations but I can understand the attraction of them and also see it as a good form of diversifying for farmers. We visited the one in Dumfries and Gallowa y a while back and even I got photos with my point and squirt pocket camera. A nice selection Clare the thoughts of Y L Gull is interesting

The one thing that did strike me at the feeding station was that everybody had come to see the kites - and they are now on the UK green list. Nobody would have thought anything of the accompanying gulls - ironically the yellow-legged gull is on the UK amber list and the herring gull (which was also present) had been a red listed bird for some years. It shows what is possible if you really want to help a species. I think our native gulls could do with a positive campaign.

Lovely pics, Clare. It is definitely a thrill to see so many Kites, especially knowing that they were very nearly extinct in the UK not that long ago. As for Gulls, I spent many happy hours as a child copying pictures of the Gulls I saw in the bird book. There was no hope of ever seeing a Gull of any kind in that area all those years ago!

Pete, I understand the possible concerns around feeding Kites or around the feeding of any birds; there are both pros and cons for that, but in addition to translocation, the feeding of Red Kites certainly has helped to restore the species in the UK.

Dave, Nice to see you posting (or have I been missing any threads where you were posting regularly, lol!) Hope all is well with you and yours and that you were unaffected by the earlier flooding there.

Ann,up here in N Yorkshire we have no official kite feeding station in fact it is discouraged but the Kites have spread and bred very well despite persecution from certain quarters. The land owners of the release site did not want any feeding station in the. area. I have been watching and counting our local Kites since their release in the late 1990's and I've never tired of it, they are quite an easy raptor to i d so even non birders recognise and enjoy them. One thought against feeding stations is that the birds tend not to spread away so much whereas in Yorkshire the birds have spread over a wide area. We were talking to some locals near one of the Scottish feeder station and they considered too many birds a bit of a pest. The station in mid Wales certainly saved the UK birds it was the only place we knew to see these magnificent raptors, my first Kite in England turned out to be a Scandinavian bird

Request sent Dave.
A friend of ours wrote a piece for the recently published boom "The Red Kites Year " describing the setting up of the release of the Yorkshire birds,he even got an OBE for his work.