[1] In O.E. is cýta; no related word appears in cognate languages. Glede, cognate with “glide,” is also another English name.
[2] George, third earl of Orford, died in 1791, and Colonel Thornton, who with him had been the latest follower of this highest branch of the art of falconry, broke up his hawking establishment not many years after. There is no evidence that the pursuit of the kite was in England or any other country reserved to kings or privileged persons, but the taking of it was quite beyond the powers of the ordinary trained falcons, and in older days practically became limited to those of the sovereign. Hence the kite had attached to it, especially in France, the epithet of “royal,” which has still survived in the specific appellation of regalis applied to it by many ornithologists. The scandalous work of Sir Antony Weldon (Court and Character of King James, p. 104) bears witness to the excellence of the kite as a quarry in an amusing story of the “British Solomon,” whose master-falconer, Sir Thomas Monson, being determined to outdo the performance of the French king’s falconer, who, when sent to England to show sport, “could not kill one kite, ours being more magnanimous than the French kite,” at last succeeded, after an outlay of £1000, in getting a cast of hawks that took nine kites running—“never missed one.” On the strength of this, James was induced to witness a flight at Royston, “but the kite went to such a mountee as all the field lost sight of kite and hawke and all, and neither kite nor hawke were either seen or heard of to this present.”
[3] Thus justifying the advice of Shakespeare’s Autolycus (Winter’s Tale, iv. 3)—“When the kite builds, look to lesser linen”—very necessary in the case of the laundresses in olden time, when the bird commonly frequented their drying-grounds.
[4] Dr R. Bowdler Sharpe (Cat. Birds Brit. Mus. i. 322) calls it M. korschun, but the figure of S. G. Gmelin’s Accipiter Korschun, whence the name is taken, unquestionably represents the moor-buzzard (Circus aeruginosus).
[5] The Brahminy kite of India, Haliastur Indus, seems to be rather a fishing eagle.
