On New Year’s Day, just as I was about to sit down to dinner, I received a call from Chris Powell to say that 
some visitors to Gigrin Farm had spotted a kite hanging in a tree. On arrival at Gigrin a few minutes later I could see that the kite had somehow managed to get a length of baler twine twisted around its wing and tangled in some twigs on the outside of the tree some 40ft above a very cold and muddy looking pond!.
The bird was still flapping with the untangled wing and as a result was spinning around winding the baler twine tighter as it did so. The wing looked quite badly injured so without further delay I climbed up and grabbed hold of the string, snapped the twigs that were holding it and bundled the kite under my fleece before climbing back down the tree.
On closer inspection the damage to the wing was not as bad as I had originally thought, being mostly ruffled feathers, but it was clear that the bird (an adult female, I think), had been there for some time as her feet had swollen up and she was very thin.
For the first few days she was unable to fly, probably due to bruising, but recovery was quite quick and her release (sporting her new wing-tags "E"), on ?? January, was featured on the BBC Wales Today programme. It’s nice to report that at the time of writing (7st May) she is still attending Gigrin on an intermittent basis and we are hoping that she might be nesting somewhere close by.
See picture board story
Our second temporary resident was admitted on April from Devil’s Bridge. This was a 2-year old male bird which had been found grounded in a garden in Devil’s Bridge. The owners had contacted RSPB but by the time the message had been passed down to me he had been on the floor for nearly two days (the finder had picked him up and put him in a box in her shed so that he didn’t get attacked by predators).
