Credit: Getty Images
![](https://unherd.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/09/chivers-100x100.jpg)
The red kite is a beautiful, imposing bird, rust-coloured, fork-tailed; it’s big, with a wingspan of up to six foot. They were driven to extinction in England — nests raided, birds shot — in the 19th century, but in the late 1980s and early 1990s some birds from Sweden and the small surviving population in Wales were brought to Buckinghamshire, with a similar programme in Scotland; a total of 93 birds were released.
Now, more than 1,000 breeding pairs are believed to live in the Chiltern hills and around. When I drive back to my parents’ place in Oxford, I often see 20 or 30 between crossing the M25 and reaching the Oxford ringroad. They ride the thermals gracefully, looking for roadkill. In the Cotswolds once I saw one taking off a few yards in front of me; it had been feasting on the carcass of a fox, I think. It was huge, like an eagle, and thrilling to see.
Red kite are not the only successful reintroduction of a formerly native British species. In Scotland, the sea eagle — also driven to extinction in this country 100 or so years ago — was reintroduced in the 1990s, and have started to breed. Ospreys returned naturally to Scotland and have been reintroduced to England, after being driven extinct in the 19th century.
Perhaps more spectacularly, beavers have been reintroduced in Gloucestershire, Devon and Scotland; they had been extinct in Britain for at least 250 years. Their revival has changed the waterways around there: the dams they build filter the rivers, removing silt from the water; they create big, still pools that fish, insects and amphibians can breed in and waterbirds feed from. The Devon reintroduction saw a 1,000% increase in frogspawn levels and a growth in local bat populations (they feed on the insects that bred in the ponds). Beaver dams also reduce the risk of flooding further downstream, by breaking up the flow of the river.
These species, though, could be just the start. Beavers, red kite, ospreys and sea eagles are all relatively recent losses to Britain’s natural heritage: we were, once, a nation of incredible wildlife. Perhaps it is time to be more ambitious about what we bring back.
Ross Barnett’s marvellous book The Missing Lynx tells the story of Britain’s lost megafauna, and it gets much more dramatic than red kite and beavers. There were hyenas in Yorkshire, which coexisted with humans. There were cheetahs, and lions (the bones of which were found when Trafalgar Square was being excavated); there were giant Irish elk, six foot tall at the shoulder. Mammoth, of course. Woolly rhinos. Sabre-toothed cats. Aurochs: vast great deadly wild oxen that could look a tall man in the eye. Hippos in the Thames.
Join the discussion
Join like minded readers that support our journalism by becoming a paid subscriber
To join the discussion in the comments, become a paid subscriber.
Join like minded readers that support our journalism, read unlimited articles and enjoy other subscriber-only benefits.
SubscribeGreat idea but a jaguar in Kruger? That was a leopard