Memento Mori

Detail of Brett memorial (1620), St Mary the Virgin, West Malling

Red Kites

According to the RSPB's website there are only 1,600 breeding pairs of red kites in Britain. This surprises me as I'd formed the impression they were becoming common. There was one wheeling overhead at the farm this morning- probably because I'd just thrown some bits of chicken carcass into the field. My sister says there's a colony of them in Basingstoke where our nephew lives and he sees so much of them that he no longer thinks of them as anything special.