Welsh Kite Trust

27 territorial pairs were located, of which 24 pairs made breeding attempts. 19 pairs were successful and produced a total of 44 young. This included our first Yorkshire record of a brood of 4 young - this to a first-time breeding pair, which were being cared for very well on the estate on which they had settled!

It has been particularly encouraging to note that in 2004 there has been a detectable spread of new breeding pairs away from the core of the release area. Exactly half of this year's young were raised in Harewood Estate, where the releases took place, whilst the others were, at varying distances, further afield. Indeed two Yorkshire releases from 2002 took the expansion of breeding range notion to the extreme, having respectively found partners in Wiltshire and Perthshire - albeit that neither breeding attempt succeeded.

A bit closer to home, two successful pairs again this year in the Yorkshire Wolds, some 40 miles or so from Harewood, indicates that this offshoot of the main population is holding its own.
A 'first' in 2004, and not one which we wish to see repeated, was the shooting of one of our 2003 Yorkshire raised birds. It was one of a brood of three tagged a few miles away from Harewood.

We saw nothing of it, post-fledging, and eventually discovered the reason. It was in The Chilterns! It had been photographed in a group of flying birds near Chinnor and enlargement of the image revealed its identity as Orange/Red 22. Nothing more of it was seen in that area but, in April 2004, a farmer in Lincolnshire found its decomposed remains in one of his fields.