To find the secrets and techniques of how purple kites increase their chicks, I construct a scaffold tower 16 metres excessive to review a nest excessive within the tree cover. The quantity of garbage I discovered there was heart-breaking.
Pink Kites are considered one of Britain’s most distinctive birds of prey. With iconic forked tails, and lengthy, angled wings, they’re now a standard sight in our skies and have impressed a lot of my work. However it hasn’t at all times been this fashion. Within the 1870s these birds had been extinct in England, Scotland and Northern Eire, and till an bold reintroduction programme within the Nineteen Nineties, had been absent from Yorkshire. So, when I discovered a well-established nest in a tree cover close to me, I utilized for a Schedule 1 license to movie their nesting behaviour.
Filming the nest
Pink kites nest in March, so it was essential I secured my conceal and cameras in winter and to additional minimise disturbance, I construct a scaffold tower 16m excessive to safe my cameras near the nest then take this down and transfer it 20 metres away the place it’ll later, after the chicks have hatched and are sufficiently old for the dad and mom to depart the nest for brief spells, home my conceal. The very first thing that strikes me after I attain the nest is how a lot garbage there may be on the nest. Pink kites construct on earlier yr’s nests, creating them from base of sticks and twigs, lined with grass and wool. However this pair have additionally used garbage. I discover baler twine, plastic, even a face masks.
Courtship
Till it is time to put up my conceal, I watch the purple kite pair reaffirm their bonds by way of spectacular aerial shows. Within the meantime my distant cameras file the kites restoring their nest with new sticks and grasses and considered one of them even scrapes out a hole for the approaching eggs. In April the pair lay three eggs, at intervals of three days. Now the feminine begins to incubate, aided sometimes by the male whose predominant duties are to feed and defend her.
Garbage within the nest
However this male is oblivious to the true risks that threaten this new household: plastic. Not solely can plastic have an effect on their digestion, if swallowed, however worse each adults and chicks are simply entangled and drown or die of chilly by plastic stopping rainwater from draining by way of. An actual get up name, to not drop litter. On Could seventh, 35 days after it was laid, the primary egg has a big crack in it and, a day later, a chick hatches, It is unhappy to see it amongst all of the garbage, however I can’t intrude and danger disturbing this new household. It is superb to witness the tender second that follows when the male lands on the nest and spots his chick for the primary time
