Llanelli Naturalists Newsletter - December 2003 - No 70
Dic Davies

I grew up in the 1950s at Nant Fforest, a small farm of about 40 acres which was midway between Llandovery and Rhandirmwyn.  The farm was not really big enough to make a living out of milk so my parents kept turkeys for the Christmas market and for Christmas 1962 we had to feather and dress over 200 turkeys.  One of the problems was always what to do with the entrails.  These ended up in a temporary heap in our orchard.  Christmas Day was a day off, and well-needed after the previous week.  At breakfast time on Boxing Day my father told me to start digging a hole to bury the ‘debris’, as it were.   I found the spade and went in the kitchen for a quick cup of tea.  I was just finishing my mug of tea when my dad went out to feed our sow.  A few minutes later he was back in the kitchen, she had come into heat and we'd have to take her to the boar.  You don't argue with sows like that and as we started up the side road to a neighbouring farm, it started snowing lightly.  By the time we had walked back home it was snowing hard and I put the spade away.  Over the next week we had more snow and gales and all thought of burying had gone out the window.

The snow showed no sign of shifting and kept drifting.  About the second week in January 1963, three kites arrived in our orchard, shy but obviously driven by famine.  They started pecking at the frozen heap of turkey bits and I was able watch them from the pantry window.  In hindsight, I'm sure they were a pair and one young one.  They came daily after that, in the late afternoon, until about the end of the month, by which time the drifts on the nearby hills had begun to clear, exposing thousands of sheep carcasses.  From the kites’ perspective, they had been through the great hunger and now the pickings were easy.

I heard years later someone say that the Red Kite population had been reduced to 13 individuals after that awful winter.  I cannot prove this, but I am certain ‘our three’ survived.  In the following years kites did nest successfully on farms nearby: they had grown used to the surrounding area during that month of turkey offal and had felt secure enough to breed there.  I remember being shown a nest - and being told "Cofia gwas - dweud dim" (remember boy - say nothing).  After forty years I feel I can say a little that, perhaps, a quarter of our kite population owed their survival to the hormones of a sow…