This Kite was formerly known in Great Britain by its old Anglo-Saxon name of Gled or Glead, which comes from its gliding flight, and is styled Red Kite in order to distinguish it from its relatives. That it was once common enough in the South of England, a proverb, still used in the New Forest shows, “Yallow as a Kite’s claw” the folk say there in describing one who has a jaundiced appearance. So common was it in the streets of London up to 200 years ago, acting the part of a scavenger in those days, that visitors from the Continent wrote of it. Some are now living who knew it as fairly common in the wooded parts of Great Britain--Ireland excepted--but the last nest in Lincolnshire, where it once was abundant, was known in 1870. In Wales, where a few still breed, the landowners are trying to protect what they consider an interesting species. The use of its tail feathers for salmon-flies brings about the bird’s destruction in Scotland, and the gamekeeper is its pronounced enemy. In Ireland it has been seldom observed. Considering the adders, rats, and enormous numbers of mice the Kite devours, the term hurtful, as applied to it, ought perhaps to be modified. 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.