We recently found ourselves in mid-Wales with a couple of days to spare. One day, we booked into a photography hide at the Gigrin Farm Red Kite Feeding Centre. There are five large hides overlooking a grassy field surrounded by trees, where every day, the staff at the farm throw out food, which attracts huge numbers of red kites.
Once persecuted and at danger of extinction in the UK, red kites have been highly successful in this area in recent years thanks to better protections and reintroduction projects. The farm claims that around 300-600 red kites turn up for feeding time here, and I can believe it. As soon as the food was thrown out, hundreds of kites were swooping down and circling above. Each nearby tree had dozens of kites on its branches, observing the situation.
It was quite a spectacle to watch, and very difficult to photograph, since the birds are so fast. They tend not to land to eat; they prefer to grab some food off the ground mid-flight and eat on the wing. I took hundreds of photos, and after a few editing sessions, drilled it down to these 8.
The animal autofocus tracking on my new(ish) Canon R10 helped a lot. The last time I photographed red kites at Argaty in Scotland, I was using a DSLR with single-point autofocus. This was one of the main reasons I wanted to get an R series camera. I used a 70-300mm lens on this occasion (equivalent to about 112-480mm in full frame). I don't think a longer lens would have helped; it was difficult enough to keep them in frame with this lens at the telephoto end.
I'd fully recommend a visit to Gigrin Farm - even if you're not a photographer - seeing so many birds of prey swooping around so close was a thrill in itself. And there's plenty of facilities on-site: ample parking, a coffee shop, gift shop, picnic area. And it's set in a beautiful part of the Welsh countryside on the outskirts of Rhayader, a very nice place to stay to explore the area.
Anyway, here are some more photos... oh, and the 'white' red kite is a leucistic bird, affected by a rare condition of reduced pigmentation. The farm says there are only around 10 of these birds known to exist in the world, so we were extra lucky to see this one close up too.
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