I’ve returned, so feel free to send me your good wildlife photos. Thanks.
Reader Mark Jones, a Briton, sent a sequence showing bird harassment. His words are indented:
I enclose a sequence I captured near my house in West Sussex this morning – a red kite (Milvus milvus) being chased off by a rook (Corvus frugilegus), I think. Apparently there are only 1600 breeding pairs of red kite in the UK (per the RSPB), so this is a pretty rare sight here – buzzards (Buteo buteo) are more common.
I saw the kite circling a few fields away and took a couple of shots from a distance, and carried on walking. Further up the road, the kite flew over my head, pursued by a rook. I managed to fire off some shots of the action. The photos aren’t cropped but they are at the limit of my zoom lens, so apologies if the shots aren’t as crisp as they might be. Last I saw, the kite was flying off into the distance and the rook seemed satisfied and broke off the chase. Hopefully the kite will return! We have rooks aplenty.
Oughta be an avian anti-bullying law.
This is extremely common corvid behavior with the Bald Eagles and other raptors in Western Washington,
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Interesting stuff. Of course the rooks are also likely to be chased off by yet smaller birds.
We stayed with my cousin in Oxfordshire in July 2015. We saw many Red Kites every day.
Red kites are quite commonly seen in the areas where the reintroduction started. Northamptonshire is another hotspot.
I’ve seen rooks harassing a grey heron. And an oystercatcher dive-bombing a marsh harrier.
Wait. What did you actually mean by that? 😎
Well done. An exciting event in the lives of the birds. I see chasing like this all the time now. Lots of song birds are raising babies and the predators are out looking for lunch.
Talk about uniform sky colour!
I remember deliberately using a digital camera to take a picture of a similarly homogeneous sky colour – it was fun to see that the file size was significantly smaller than that for the routine shots I had taken!
Were you possibly taking astrophotography “flats”?
βPer
Red kites have seen a massive expansion of numbers and area since their reintroduction. During 13 years living near the Chiltern we went from seeing one every couple of journeys past Wycombe, to seeing at least 6 on every journey. We even started seeing them from our kitchen window in Windsor just before we moved. 9 years on, I wonder how the numbers are.
Why doesn’t this kite have the typical indented V in the tail that is I always use to identify them?
Corvids are intelligent and seem to find pleasure in being a menace.
Red Kites do seem to be more common now than the official figures suggest. I showed a friend these pictures and he said his son was grass cutting (agricultural) nearby, followed by 10 Kites!