Red Kite Morning

Happy Year, new or whatever...

There is a Robin singing outside the front door on New Years Day; a sign of hope if there is any. And buds in the daffodils that I planted last autumn, although that mostly just reminds me of my eco-anxiety and the fact everything’s all blooming wrong, the whole lot of it, so that’s less welcoming I suppose.

I started the day outside at pre-dawn, the sky a dark plum grey and air frigid with cold. Everything felt paused, as though I were a stranger that had walked in on a locals pub and all chatter stopped.

The chickens were waking, hungry and fluffed and I placed their feed and water in its spots to the run before retreating to the beckoning glow of the kitchen door. Something stopped me on the threshold, and I turned back to the shrouded garden. The sense of living things had resumed, inertia broken; the morning swelling into lightness. And far off in the wood came the sharp crack of the foxes yell, repeated. I could feel the grey breath, gold glint of eye, fire heat of internal spark that urged the animal to voice in the depth of winter dark.

Indoors, I turned the calendar to ‘January’, and crept back into white sheets that still retained a hint of warmth from a nights rest, and lay awake watching the room slowly pale and lighten.

New Years day, as ever, the brighter sister to New Years Eve. The latter has always made me feel a bit uncomfortable and a bit sick, like when someone pronounces a word totally wrong, or over boils vegetables. Forgivable, but awkward to witness.

I’m all for brightening the dark of midwinter of course, but I’ll save new whatever for the energy of spring, thanks very much.

Despite my misgivings, a fresh calendar year does offer an opportunity - its a useful date to start counting from. And this year, I’m counting birds. Most years I start off this with good intentions, but by the summer, have misplaced my notebook and got distracted by a myriad other things...

I have always been a birdwatcher; from early childhood begging my Dad to buy and help me hang up half coconut filled with fat, and red net bags of peanuts, then craning up at a steamed up bedroom window to watch as flocks of sparrows and starlings, and acrobatic blue tits, came to the garden bird table. My fascination with birds peaked in my teenage years, but my involvement with the hobby has rather tailed off in the decade or two so since. These days I’m more of an accidental birdwatcher: I still notice them when they cross my path, but I haven’t sought them out with purpose, for a while.

My first bird of 2026 was a Red Kite. Yes, a Red Kite. Anyone with an interest in or knowledge of UK wildlife conservation will recognise the significance of this statement. I saw my first Red Kite in the South Downs on a Saturday afternoon in 2006, and in the two decades since, things have progressed to the point where going even a few days without spotting one of these beautiful birds of prey on their approx. 6ft wingspan, somewhere overhead during my daily activities, is a rare occurrence. But it wasn’t always this way. Red Kites are an example of a hugely successful conservation effort here in the UK, (almost to the point where in some locations they have started to become so plentiful they are becoming victims of their own success) thanks to a number of incredibly prolific reintroduction projects. In the mid-1980s Red Kite numbers were staggeringly low and at risk of extinction in the UK, with perhaps less than 50 pairs remaining in a relict population in the Welsh hills. Now, 40 years later, there is an estimated population in excess of 4,4000 breeding pairs across the UK; 17% of the worlds Red Kites live here, both in our countryside and urban fringes. And as I opened the living room curtains onto a bright frosty garden at the very start of 2026, one of these majestic birds soared high in the winter sunshine, forked tail twisting in the air currents, long languid wings catching the pale yellow light. ‘Oh!’ I thought. ‘A Red Kite! That’s nice.’ and went and put the kettle on.

Photo by REGINE THOLEN on Unsplash