The Rev. Morris BA, the Red Kite and me (From Western Telegraph)

The Rev. Morris BA, the Red Kite and me

4:37pm Sunday 28th June 2009

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This morning, Daphne shouted to me, “Quick, there is a Red Kite and the bird is really near.” This was the closest I had ever seen one of these magnificent birds although I often see them wheeling in the area of around Carnedd Meibion Owen.

This time, although the Kite was already drifting away I grabbed a camera and managed some pictures.

The Red Kite was once common and flew everywhere in Tudor London where it scavenged amongst the offal and rotting flesh, of the stinking streets of the capital. In those days it was protected as it was so useful as a scavenger.

To-day it has vanished from our cities , its food supply gone. The bird has been lucky to survive at all as gamekeepers, with an ignorance and prejudice that is not unknown today, thought the bird endangered their precious game birds.

By 1910 the keepers, to satisfy the need of their wealthy and aristocratic employers to slaughter game birds by the thousand, shot trapped and poisoned the kite. Only a few survived in the fastness of the remote hills of Mid Wales.

“What a beautiful morning, let’s go out and kill something,” is a common attitude.

Daphne inherited many of her parents’ books, when her mother died this year, and as her parents ere enthusiasts for wildlife I thought I would see what was said about the Kite in the past.

This is from “A History of British Birds” by the Rev. F.O.Morris B.A. and the author updated his massive work in 1902. There are four hundred plates “all coloured by hand.”

This was a labour of love, which when you consider the absence of the modern facilities we take for granted, stuns the mind. The volumes were given to Daphne’s late father and his two brothers in 1908.

The Rev. Morris antipated the fate of the Kite. I read these sentences: “Where is a bird of its size, and of its handsome appearance, and which is so easily caught in traps, and so destructive of game, to remain incognito, or in safety these days? The marvel is that a single specimen remains as a living monument of the former existence of its kind.

In these days of so called progress it is to be feared that even this state of affairs may not continue – no Aborigines’ Protection Society exists for the Kite.”

I wish the Rev. Morris could have seen the kite as it wheeled above me this morning. He would have delighted in its survival despite his fears. He wrote in the Preface to the Third Edition; “One touch of nature makes the whole world kin” and recalls the “Old times; good times,” of the past.

He seems to have been an elderly man when he wrote this at Nunburnholme Rectory, Hayton, York in 1891. His recollections were from the happy times in the past which he conjured up by his memories of birds and the wildness of their surroundings.

I had not heard of the Rev. Morris until this morning; now I feel I almost know him. Indeed, wish I had. He had a subversive, if gentle, tone which underpins his comments and which appeals.