Death on Earth: Adventures in Evolution and Mortality by Jules Howard

Author:Jules Howard [Howard, Jules]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781472915078
Amazon: 1472915070
Publisher: Bloomsbury Sigma
Published: 2016-05-09T22:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER TEN

This is Not a Sheep

From over the hills to the left they had loomed. At least a hundred at first. Then two hundred. Looking up higher into the atmosphere I had seen more. Five hundred. Still just dots, really. Five hundred dots. They formed an enormous spinning column, these dots, like distant wreckage swirling within a tornado. Debris with menace. There was a faint mewing from the sky, so light as if to be almost imagined. My family, part of the audience, were within a crowd of perhaps three hundred people that had gathered specifically to see this, arguably one of the western world’s most impressive gatherings of scavengers. There was a small lake in the middle of the bowl in which we sat; our conversations and nervous laughter, as the dots came nearer, echoed over the water, our noises held in by rows of dense pine trees that overlooked us on all sides. An echo-chamber. After a few minutes they came nearer still. We sat underneath them, as if in stands, like an expectant crowd. It really was like a stadium, and we were the expectant hordes, baying for blood. We looked up. A few minutes later it looked like there were thousands of them. They were getting closer. They were red kites.

In recent years seeing the red kites has become THE THING TO DO in Wales. The ‘feeding station’ (as such sites are called) in which we were sat at Bwlch Nant yr Arian was designed to give small numbers of the threatened red kites ‘a helping hand’ in the late 1990s. Now there seem to be thousands. Red kites had faced incredibly serious declines across Britain, and this was deemed a nice way to help their resurgence at one of their strongholds. And it has helped them locally. Each day (including on Christmas Day) hundreds of kites from miles around visit this site to congregate and feast upon offcuts presented by a local butcher. It works like this: a nature reserve manager carts the butcher’s meat (in a wheelbarrow) across the site to a little well-maintained mound in the middle so the audience can clearly watch the birds coming in. The scraps are thrown across the mound, and the birds take it in turns to get their fill. My youngest had not yet been born at the time we visited, but Lettie (then a baby) and my wife Emma were there. We had perched ourselves on soft mounds of moss on the hillside as the soaring birds of prey made their approach. There was a buzz about the place, like a music festival about to start; people sat on picnic blankets and nibbled homemade sandwiches, and many had their cameras ready and pointing at the mound on which the offal was to be presented. It dawned on me that many of the nice shots I’ve seen of red kites in magazines were probably taken here, where it’s incredibly easy to take exceptional photos of red kites

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