As these populations begin to shrink due to the death rate exceeding the number of births, they can eventually enter a vortex: the population continues to decline until it goes extinct. Mounting threats put pressure on populations over time. This might be because their development is permanently impaired due to a failure to meet their nutritional needs in early life potentially making them smaller, more vulnerable to disease, and less capable of hunting. The authors concluded that some chicks born during a drought year, like 2022 in England and Wales, continued to face the consequences as adults. Young red kites hunker down in a Berlin nest. Some of the causes of these declines have existed for centuries, such as hunting. While things are generally looking up for the species at a global level, populations in some countries, including Spain, France, Portugal and Slovakia are declining. The number of red kites has soared (pun intended) by a whopping 1,935% between 19 across the UK. This is often hailed as a conservation success story. The UK’s growing population of red kites is largely a result of their reintroduction to parts of England and Scotland beginning in 1989. Population growth throughout large swathes of the red kite’s range meant that the species was bumped up to “least concern” in 2020. Assessments made between 20 classified red kites as “near threatened” on the IUCN Red List, a global system for classifying each species’ extinction risk.

The conservation status of this species has looked promising in recent years. In parts of the Chiltern Hills, for example, Red Kites are active throughout the entire year and are hard not to see.Take a drive down England’s M40 motorway and chances are you’ll see a large bird with a forked tail overhead searching for roadkill: the red kite. So, if you rewind back to the 1950s or so, it certainly would have been rare to spot a Red Kite in the UK and some parts of Europe.įast forward back to the present day, and you probably wouldn’t think these birds were once extinct in England and Scotland. In addition to being killed as ‘vermin’ (as Red Kites are scavengers), egg collectors raided Red Kite nests for their large eggs. For example, the UK’s population was reduced to just a handful of breeding birds confined to Wales only. The European population of Red Kites plummeted by some 30% in the mid-19th-century. Red Kites were once ubiquitous across Europe but faced heavy persecution for the best part of 300 to 400 years. During the winter, Red Kites can be spotted around the eastern and southern coasts of England and western coasts of Wales. In central parts of England, Wales and Scotland, Red Kites are fairly common, and can be spotted all year round as they are residents. There is much more to learn about this gracious bird of prey - read on to find out!

Red Kites have become a flagship for bird conservation in the UK, where conservationists rescued the population from just a few breeding pairs in Wales to over 5,000 breeding pairs spread across much of the UK. However, this wasn’t the case until around the 1990s when Red Kite populations sharply increased as a result of conservation efforts.

This large raptor has become a hallmark bird of the Chiltern Hills and Home Counties, where you can spot them almost everywhere. They also inhabit parts of southern Scandinavia, northern Europe to Latvia, and eastern Europe to Ukraine. 95% of the Red Kite population lives in Europe, primarily in western and central Europe, with resident populations residing in the UK, France, Germany, Belgium, and parts of Spain and Italy. Red Kites inhabit broadleaf deciduous woodlands but are adapting to semi-urban environments. Here, we’ll answer the question: where do Red Kites live? With a wingspan nearing 2m, these large birds are unmistakable when they graciously glide on calm winds, circling above fields, woodlands, and urban areas. Red Kites are magnificent raptors from the Accipitridae family.

Bird red kite