Time to settle down?

The world around us never ceases to amaze me. Most of us cannot grasp the concept of the Earth having been formed billions of years ago, of the stars that we see at night being further away than we could reach travelling at rocket speed for a lifetime (the nearest star to the sun would take over 73,000 years at rocket speed to reach!). And, even though we see it on wildlife programmes and read about it in books, the idea that birds migrate from one side of the world to the other, not just once, but year after year after year, is also hard to fathom. Nature really is incredible. I was reminded of this recently when checking the daily satellite transmissions from one red kite in particular.

A red kite, marked with yellow and brown wing-tags bearing the code ‘9G’, fledged from a nest site in Co. Down in 2022. 9G is very special because she was fitted with a satellite backback in the days before she left the nest. [Indeed, she is extra special because her mother is also satellite tagged – see previous blog here about “Kevin”]. 9G was a scrawny looking chick and very late on the go, in a very scrawny looking nest.  But two weeks later her weight and growth measurements were fine and put her in the ideal bracket for receiving a transmitter. The nest was fairly clean (as kite nests go), with the usual remains of some rats and feathers from corvids stamped into the nest substrate of wool lining and regurgitated pellets. The nest was in a field of bright yellow oil see rape. 9G’s parents had failed to produce young at this same site previously and we had found two broken eggs under the nest on that occassion. We wondered if perhaps too many rats in the diet might be having an impact on egg failure and chick growth (9G wasn’t tagged until fully grown in mid-July – which is late) due to sub-lethal levels of rodenticides in the diet. These are the sort of questions that never get answered but that you mull over year after year.

Anyway, 9G turned out to be anything but scrawny. In fact, she is the most well travelled of all the red kites we have satellite tracked to date. And she has reminded us about something we knew was in-built into red kites’ DNA, the search for companionship of other red kites and the fluidity of juvenile birds until they put down roots.

Not long after fledging in July 2022, 9G headed directly to the red kite population in Co. Wicklow. This in itself is not unusual. One of the first ever released kites, Black V (nicknamed ‘Volt’), did the same in 2008 and has nested in Wicklow since 2010. What is unusual, at least to me (thinking on human-scales), is the movements 9G has made since; She has been back and forth across the border no less than 22 times!! She definitely favours being in Co. Wicklow to Co. Down, if the amount of time spent there is anything to go by. She has made several one-day stops back to Co. Down before returning south, once only travelling as far Rostrevor before making a U-turn for Dublin!

She has also made flights over Phoenix park in Dublin (a day-trip to the zoo?), and when we look at a snapshot of one particular month she had visited 7 different counties! The only place she seems to stay for any length of time in recent months is near Ashbourne, Co. Meath.

On the 18^th March 2024 we thought we had claimed her back as a ‘Northern Irish bird’ when she appeared in Co. Down for the fourth time since the beginning of February – alas it wasn’t to be and she was back in Lusk, Co. Dublin, by the following evening – but only to set off back to Co.Down the next morning!

Now that 9G is coming into her second year she should be starting to think about settling down –  so she has a big decision to make! Which side of the border will she settle on – or will she ever settle at all? We will keep you updated!