Basic HTML Version
32
City & Village Tours: 0845 812 5000 info@cityandvillagetours.com
Following a series of reintroductions between 1989
and 1994 releasing Spanish birds at sites including
John Paul Getty’s Wormsley mansion on the M40
Buckinghamshire-Oxfordshire boundary just 15 miles
from the Thames, the bird has made a spectacular
return in the Chilterns and today the birds with their
unmistakable forked tails and a wing span of five and
a half feet can often be seen soaring in the sky above
the Upper Thames. We tend to whoop with delight
when we spot one today but for the ancients the kite,
or puttock, was a bird of ill omen and at the very least
a thief pinching linen items from washing lines to
plump up their nests.
Another common bird of the Thames that’s no stranger
to persecution is the fish guzzling cormorant. The
cormorant is associated by Shakespeare with greed and
gluttony but for the generation after Shakespeare in the
time of James I fishing with cormorants, as they still
do in some parts of China, became fashionable. Often
on a Thames cruise you’ll see these prehistoric looking
birds, their feathers burnished like fire blackened logs,
perched atop weir posts, wings spread to warm and dry
after a fishing expedition. James I kept a Master of
Cormorants for the Thames and although this post has
long disappeared our present Queen still has a Warden
of the Swans and a Marker of the Swans both posts
dating from just 1993! That’s a good pub quiz
question: the two modern posts were introduced to
replace the much more ancient post of Royal Swan
Keeper which had dated back to the 13
th
century but
was abolished in 1993. The Warden of the Swans is
Chris Perrins, Oxford University Professor and
President of the British Ornithologists Union and the
Marker of the Swans is a chap called David Barber
who, ironically doesn’t actually mark any birds
during the annual five day Swan-Upping in the third
week of July when the Queen's Marker of the Swans
and the Vintners' and the Dyers'
and their respective
Swan Uppers row up the Thames in traditional
wooden skiffs rounding all the mute swans between
Sunbury and Clifton Hampden. Once a count for the
carvery this is now all about conservation and the
swans bills are no longer marked with nicks (one
for the dyers and two for the vintners - hence the
pub name The Swan with Two Necks and no nicks
for the Queen) and only the cygnets are rounded up
and ringed.