Topic: How do I get rid of moles and voles.

[ancellsfarmer]

Kites are carrion feeders in the main; they take small ground prey as well, including insects and worms, but they're not agile enough in the air to take birds on any regular basis.

The success of the Red Kite in the Chilterns is mainly due to the provision of regular "roadkill" along the M40 corridor. I understand that there are very few reports of kites taking live food as rodents or birds on the wing.
 I did enjoy the view of a solitary bird doing low level passes over the restaurant debris left out for collection along Oxford Road, Reading.A magnificent sight of a large wingspan judging perfectly the gap between oncoming double decker buses and expertly executing stall turns, snatching scraps and soaring up above the early morning commutor traffic.

[Digeroo]

I have not seem a kite take a kestrel.  But since the red kites arrived they kestrals have disappeared.

I have never seen a red kite on the ground even on a road kill.

They pounce on birds in the tops of the trees. 

When I first started my plot I was constantly surrounded by birds.  Now I hardly see one.  There was a wren about for sometime but that has gone too. 

I hope that people in areas without the red kites will start keeping records of their small birds, so they have definitive records of what they loose in the future.

[Robert_Brenchley]

If the kites have eaten all the small birds, then what are they eating now they've disappeared? In that situation, you'd expect predator numbers to crash and allow the prey to multiply again.

[squeezyjohn]

There have been lots more immigrants round our way in recent times, and I've put on a bit of weight in the last few years.  Does this mean that immigrants make me fatter?  Maybe they're eating your kestrels too!

Does that sound ridiculous?  Of course it does.  Because 'thing A' happens at the same time as 'thing B' it doesn't prove that A causes B or vice versa no matter how likely you think it is.

[Silverleaf]

I think that kites have been getting a lot more "help" than other birds, what with them being pretty easy to reintroduce, and being a good poster child for conservation efforts. It's very obvious to see the effects of the work that's been done since there's a big difference between a handful of pairs in Wales and the much larger numbers we see now, so they tend to get prioritised. No one will notice if we have a thousand more sparrows, but a thousand more kites can't be overlooked, so that's where the money goes.

(It's a bit like how we'll donate money to save pandas or tigers but no one cares about all the insect species that go extinct.)

Many bird species are in decline whether there's kites in the area or not. So bird numbers are down for many reasons, but kites have been getting a big helping hand and sparrows and starlings haven't. It's easy to think that kites are the problem, but the problems with songbird numbers go much further back than the reintroduction of red kites.