Even so, it was an anxious moment when the day came to release them to their new home in England. Carefully nurtured for over a month, they all successfully fledged became proficient fliers. Credit: Ian EvansĪfter collecting the unfledged chicks from nests in Spain, and overseeing their transit on a British Airways flight, the chicks had to be quarantined in specially-built aviaries at the release site. A red kite chick from the original reintroduction project. It was the beginning of a tremendously successful species reintroduction programme, which was subsequently followed by the release of four Welsh birds and 11 Navarran birds in 1991, 20 birds in 19 (10 from Navarra and 10 from Aragon in each year), and finally a further 20 birds from Aragon in 1994. Ian Evans: On 10th and 19th July 1990, two Welsh birds and 11 Spanish birds from the region of Navarra were released in the Chilterns Hills on the Oxfordshire/Buckinghamshire border. By the 1980s, the red kite was one of only three globally threatened species in the UK. Red kites used to breed across much of the UK, but persecution over a 200-year period saw numbers fall as they increasingly became a target for egg collectors, reducing them to a few breeding pairs in central Wales. 30 years on, Natural England's Ian Evans - the first project officer on the pioneering red kite reintroduction project to the Chilterns Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty - tells us the story of his experience on the ground-breaking species reintroduction project in 1990.
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