I've just spent a few days in Snowdonia, supposedly for photography, however the weather wasn't cooperating and most of the time it was dull with very flat lighting and not very conducive to getting great shots. I did get one day with quite nice weather (although still very cold) and decided to head south to Rhayader and visit Gigrin Farm again to watch the kites.

Gigrin Farm is a feeding station, where chunks of beef are placed out in a field to encourage the kites, buzzards, ravens etc to come down and feed. There are a number of hides along one side of the field, to provide a good viewpoint without disturbing the birds.

Although the kites are seen chasing crows from time to time, in order to steal their food, it is very unusual to see much squabbling between kites. After all, it is probably less effort to just pick food up from the ground than fight over one particular chunk. For some reason one particular chunk of beef seemed to be particularly attractive and the kite that grabbed it was immediately chased by two others. He managed to hang onto the booty for about 15-20 seconds before finally giving up and dropping it, whereupon these two guys moved in on it. Unfortunately, I missed the actual grab of the meat as my camera hit the buffers and stopped shooting. I hadn't expected the chase to last quite as long as it did and had taken about 35 shots in several short bursts by this point.

This is actually cropped from the full image, which also shows the 'victim' of this mugging, and can be seen by clicking on this thumbnail:



Alternatively, you can see several selected frames from the sequence in my kites & buzzards gallery by clicking on this thumbnail:



You can also view the images I took during my last visit to Gigrin Farm in that gallery. More shots will be added shortly as I work through the rest of the latest batch of images.

All comments are welcome, good or bad, I always value the opinions of others, so please leave a message if you can spare a minute. Thanks.