A Sky Full of Kites: A Rewilding Story | Tom Bowser

 

An inspirational account of one family’s journey from farming to rewilding and how they brought Red Kites back into Scotland’s skies.

Once Britain’s most common bird of prey, Red Kites had been wiped out by the early 1900s in Scotland and England following centuries of persecution. When some reintroduced kites began roosting on their 1,400-acre farm at Argaty in Perthshire, Tom Bowser’s parents, Lynn and Niall, decided to turn their estate into a safe haven. They began feeding the birds and invited the world to come and see them, learn about them and fall in love with them.

A Sky Full of Kites is the story of the Argaty Red Kite project, and the re-establishing of these magnificent raptors to Scotland, but it is also much more than that. Ill at ease with the traditional rural values of livestock farming, Lynn and Niall’s son Tom, who returned to work on the farm after a career in journalism, reveals his passion for nature and his desire to dedicate his family’s land to conservation.