2023-04-25 20:00:48
In recent years, dozens of red kites have settled in the Netherlands. Perhaps because they have been chased out of their habitat elsewhere? It may also be related to climate change. Abroad they seem to be looking for higher ground and also in the north: in Sweden they are doing well.
Red kites are large, slender birds of prey with a deeply forked tail, which they use as a rudder for their sometimes spectacular maneuvers. They hunt birds and small mammals. In the Ardennes and Eifel, they catch many voles on farmyards. There are virtually no voles left in the Netherlands and the stripping of the landscape is also progressing abroad, although no country can match the Netherlands in this.
All the more remarkable that the kites move to the Netherlands. All the more so since red kites are sensitive to disturbance during egg laying. “The fact that we are standing here may discourage the birds from breeding in this grove,” says wouwen expert Mark Zekhuis, Overijssel Landscape employee and independent nature adviser. “I witnessed a bulldozer leveling an adjacent dirt track and the nest immediately being abandoned.”
Zekhuis takes me on his quest through Salland, where several red kites have nested. But last year only one pair achieved breeding success, as can be read in bird of prey magazine The Tackle. This misery also turned out to be the trend in other parts of the country. Although thirty pairs were still nesting in 2022, only fourteen of them raised young.
Is the steady increase over? We’ll see this year. Zekhuis and I drive and walk past all potential breeding grounds and even behind the wheel, not a speck in the sky seems to escape the man. We see everything, including two red kites. Their curved wings make a colorful impression and their tails glow orange in the low sunlight. Such beautiful birds! Let’s be careful with them.
Three times a week, biologist Koos Dijksterhuis writes about something that grows or blooms. Read his previous Nature Diaries here.
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