104+ Red Kites over Colyton in 2 days

With the continuing hot and settled weather I was hopeful we'd have more Red Kites today. 2 over Colyton mid-morning was the best of it until the afternoon when there was a strong passage again with another 22+ birds. It was more difficult to be sure of numbers than yesterday as all except 5 of the birds in the afternoon were extremely high so we ended up writing a couple off as possible repeats and likely missed a fair few due to altitude.

Fran reported 5 over Seaton in the morning and a few others were seen locally on patch that didn't come over Colyton, but like yesterday it seems Colyton had more going over than any other site locally. Well, any other site being watched that is!

Looking at tweets (Twitter) it sounds as though we smashed the Devon record for Red Kites (from one site in one day) from our garden in Colyton yesterday which seems absolutely crazy. We were very strict and deliberately conservative if there was any uncertainty when counting so our counts will be below the actual numbers that went over on both days. It's nice that this record is both from the garden and within the patch boundary, but with the way the Red Kite population is increasing in the UK this may not even be that impressive in a few years time. We'll see!

Now I need to catch up on some sleep because I've been birding during the days and ended up working through a lot of last night! Worth it though. So worth it.

Pic from yesterday as I didn't bother with the camera today