A naturalist, writing in 1839, tells how he once took away a young Kite from a nest containing two; it became very tame and would sit on his hand, never attempting to hurt him with its sharp talons. Sometimes he let it stray away and it always came home, though it might be out for a day or two; until it intruded on an old crone in her cottage. She quickly killed it as an ill-favoured fowl. I have seen a tame Kite swoop down during a circling flight and take a mouse from the hand of the late Lord Lilford as he sat, as was his wont, in his wheeled chair among his favourite birds.
Macaulay, alluding to the Kite’s love for carrion writes:
“The kites know well the long stern swell
That bids the Romans close.”
Wordsworth was familiar with it in his walks:
“Near the midway cliff the silvered kite
In many a whistling circle wheels her flight.”
Robert Burns was not a friend of the bird, Quarles’ “brood-devouring kite,” for he likened the “father of all evil” to it:
“Here is Satan’s picture,
Pouncing poor Redcastle
Like a blizzard gled,
Sprawlin’ like a taed.”
But Hurdis was more kind and just:
“Mark but the soaring kite and she will read
Brave rules for diet; teach thee how to feede;
She flies aloft; she spreads her ayrie plumes
Above the earth; above the nauseous fumes
Of dang’rous earth; she makes herself a stranger
T’ inferior things, and checks at every danger.”
We may perhaps be allowed, by the chariest of agriculturists, to say that a species may be most undesirable in certain districts, but a welcome and even useful bird in others; and this is specially true of birds who devour carrion.