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Klaus Rassinger & Gerhard Cammerer/Museum Wiesbaden, CC BY-SA Helping species adapt Red kite eggs in a German natural history museum collection. This highlights how older threats may conspire with new ones to reverse recent progress. By the late 1980s, red kites were extinct in England and Scotland. The bird’s increasing rarity made it a prime target for taxidermists and egg collectors, particularly in the Victorian era. This has happened once before with the British population.īeginning in the 16th century, legal and illegal killings reduced red kite numbers. 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. 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.