David Bennett

Hunted to Near Extinction
Red kites are one of the United Kingdom success stories of the past twenty years, but they were hunted almost to extinction in the nineteenth century, with just a few birds left in the wild in Wales.

They were reintroduced into the UK 1989 at the initiative of the Joint Nature Conservation Committee (JNCC) which is the statutory advisor to the Government on UK and international nature conservation.

The JNCC worked together with the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds (RSPB) and English Nature (now replaced with a body called Natural England).

The reason I mention it is that the decision to reintroduce red kites was not just a matter of a conservation body rearing and releasing a few birds, but was considered at government level against the backdrop of what was in the best interests of nature conservation in the UK and to honor Britain’s international treaty obligations concerning wildlife.

The reintroduction of red kites has been very successful but they are still on the ‘amber’ watch list for endangered birds.

The risk is not from environmental factors, but from people. The Wildlife and Countryside Act 1981 makes it an offence to take, injure or kill a red kite or to take, damage or destroy its nest, eggs or young. But just in May of this year the BBC reported that the illegal poisoning of a red kite in the Yorkshire Dales was being investigated by police. It had eaten bait laced with the pesticide alphachloralose, which is often used illegally as a pest control.

Red Kite Facts
The wingspan of a red kite can be as much as five or six feet (nearly two metres), but amazingly their bodies weigh just two or three pounds (less than one and half kilos). That enables them to circle around effortlessly on thermals for hours eyeing the air and the ground looking for prey.

They are not fast flyers and they are not built for overtaking birds in the air. But they can change direction quickly and catch an inexperienced juvenile crow in mid-air.

They also hunt rabbits, rats, mice, other small animals. And they eat invertebrates such as earthworms, which paints a strange picture when one imagines those claws and that beak being used to hunt a worm.

They eat carrion as well, and in the Middle Ages they were common in towns, cleaning up the streets. And for that reason they were protected. But in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries they began to be seen as pests – hence their near extinction.

Kites have very good eyesight and when they see something that interests them, or they want to lose height, they fold their wings and swoop down, like in this series of photographs I took a few weeks ago at Harewood, a small village that surrounds a country estate near Leeds in Yorkshire.

Red kites were introduced here in 1999 and there are now quite a number of them in the area. I have seen as many as a dozen at one time, dotted about the wide expanse of sky, some just dots high in the air as they ride the thermals.

About The Photographs
These shots are crops from the central area of the series of photographs I took. I shot them with a long lens (70-200mm) but the birds were still small in the viewfinder.

I have seen red kites perch in the high branches of trees at Harewood, and one day I hope to see a red kite in a tree and have a camera with me. It always seems to be one or the other.

The ‘Why’ of Beehive Design

The behavior of honeybees is fascinating and complex, and honeybees are vital to the pollination of very many crops. This makes the fact that they are under threat of extinction worldwide from colony collapse disorder (CCD) all the more serious. [ See this article Honey Bees: Nature’s Linchpin In Great Peril ]

I wanted to take some photographs of bees, so we went to see a demonstration of beekeeping. I saw the beekeeper lifting the frames from inside the hive and examining them, but I didn’t understand the ‘why’ of what I was looking at.

Then a couple of weeks later I saw a display at the apiary of the Leeds Beeskeepers Association and the reason for the design of modern beehives became clear.

Skeps

This is a traditional straw beehive, known as a skep. It is the kind of beehive that was used for centuries in England and which continued in use until well into the 1800s. You probably recognize the shape, which is found on the labels of jars of honey and used as the design for little pottery honey pots.
It is made of a rope of straw tied into a shape to mimic the shape of a natural hive that bees might look for in a hollow in a tree or between rocks.

The design varies a little, with some skeps having the entrance at the top while others have them at the bottom, but they all share one characteristic, which is that the beekeeper has to destroy the hive to get the honey out.

The Bee Space

Then in the 1850s the Reverend L. L. Langstroth noticed that bees will not bring the surfaces of two combs closer together than a ‘bee space’ – about the width of a finger – and that piece of knowledge is what determines the interior arrangement of modern hives.

Modern Hives

Modern hives use sheets of beeswax stretched on wooden frames. The frames are hung inside the outer case of the hive with a bee space between them. A bee space is also left around the edges of the frames so that the bees can move freely inside the hive.

To encourage the bees to start building combs as quickly as possible, the sheets are impressed with a honeycomb shape. The bees could bridge the space between the frames if they wanted to, but they generally don’t want to because they want access to the cells, so the design suits the bees and the beekeeper.

In The Frame

Beekeepers use a hive tool – a flat bar of metal with a hook at one end – to lever out the frames from the hive so they can inspect them. Even with the bee space design, the bees may still extend the combs beyond the end of the frame, and the beekeeper then has to scrape that off otherwise he or she won’t be able to fit the frame back in the hive.

The honeybee in the photograph at the top of this article is sitting on a piece of comb that the beekeeper had scraped off a frame.

Bee Chains

One other fact of honeybee behavior is that honeybees like the dark and when a beekeeper lifts out a frame to examine it, the bees tend to migrate to the darkest part on the frame – at the bottom. And they may hang on and form a bee chain like in this photograph.

I actually missed the point when the chain was at its longest, which was about twice the length in this photograph.
 

Photographing Bees

I wanted to photograph honeybees for these articles and also for our ecards, but it is proving more difficult than I imagined.

The reason is that bees move constantly. They have four wings (with each pair on either side hooked together when the bee is at rest) and when they are out foraging for nectar and pollen, their wings are buzzing more or less constantly, and very fast.

And in the hive they are constantly fanning the honey to drive off moisture before they cap the cells with wax.

Collared doves first flew in to Britain in the 1950s, expanding their territory that already stretched from Europe all the way across to Japan.

They are fairly common now in England. If you haven’t seen one, the adult bird is a smaller and more delicate than a pigeon. Its feathers are a warm grey tinged and flecked with pink and a hint of blue and it has a white and black collar around the back and sides of its neck – hence its name.

While they are now fairly common in built-up areas in England, I had never seen a pair of young in the nest until last week.

The story began last winter when my mother’s neighbor put a folded-up director’s chair out on his balcony. A few weeks ago a pair of collared doves made a nest in it. And Sonny, my mother’s neighbor, invited me to look at the young birds and take some photographs. So I set the camera up on a tripod and waited until the birds settled down.

As I looked out onto the balcony, I wondered why the birds had nested there, right in front of the window, near the swish of the curtains and people moving around inside the flat.

One thing about photography is that it offers a chance to look at things that are not otherwise so easy to see at leisure. But what a surprise when I looked at the shot on the computer screen and noticed the size of the beak on one of the young birds.

Adult collared doves have a demure and gentle appearance with small, narrow beaks. But the beak on this young bird was anything but small. And now I have this image of collared doves growing to maturity with the bird growing up out of its already fully-grown beak rather than the beak growing out of the bird. I can see that some of the beak will be covered by the feathers that will grow in front of the bird’s beak – but still.

And I could see the little depression where the ear is – something that is completely hidden by a tuft of feathers in the adult bird.