HOW MANY PEOPLE DIED FOR RACHEL CARSON'S SINS?:

 In medieval cities kites were as commonplace as pigeons today, and as scavengers served a vital function, clearing the streets of human detritus. In The Knight's Tale Chaucer had a kite pilfer a bone from a pair of dogs. Shakespeare - whose collected works refer to red kites no fewer than  15 times - described London in Coriolanus as  the 'city of kites and crows'.

This alliance came to an end with improved urban sanitation and the Tudor Vermin Acts, which introduced bounty payments for species including the red kite. Records show that 329 kites were killed in Tenterden, Kent, between 1679 and 1693. In Morwenstow, Cornwall, 276 were killed between 1676 and 1690.

By the late-18th and 19th centuries, gamekeepers had seized the mantle of eradicating  the kite to stop the birds taking the chicks of ground-nesting birds. In 1808, according to the ornithologist Ian Carter, an expert on the reintroduction of the red kite, the Marquess of Bute prepared an oath for gamekeepers on his estate in Argyll: 'I shall use my best endeavours to destroy all birds of prey etc... wherever they can be found therein. So help me God.'

The decline was hastened by the fact that the rarer the red kite became, the more egg collectors targeted its nests. This situation culminated in a letter written in 1903 by the naturalist and Aberystwyth University professor JH Salter to the British Ornithologists' Club, pleading for help to save the remaining pairs, which he located in Carmarthenshire's Towy Valley.

The letter prompted the formation of an unlikely and self-funded coalition, comprising landowners, farmers, a retired colonel and a local vicar. They circulated pamphlets imploring gamekeepers not to shoot and kept a watch - and a veil of secrecy - around nesting sites.

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