Kite food

There is little to be said in favour of a lorry crash on the M40 motorway except as an opportunity to watch the red kites.

Two hours in stationary traffic under a sky full of soaring scavengers can be almost a pleasure - as long as the need to be out of Oxford and into London is not acute.

Or, even if it is acute.

A full set of blocked carriageways is not a fact to be changed before its time.

Nothing was moving in the early hours of a Wednesday afternoon but birds with forked tails and fringed wings - beautiful chestnut rarities a decade or so ago, now the most visible pride of the Chilterns.

The 'hungry kite' had once a fearsome reputation - as a careless and devious killer.

Cart-crash victims in the Elizabethan age could fear for the fate not only of their bodies:

"Ravens, crows and kites
Fly o'er our heads and downward look on us,
As we were sickly prey "

But also their livestock:

"Who finds the partridge in the puttock's nest
But may imagine how the bird was dead,
Although the kite soar with unbloodied beak ?
Even so suspicious is this tragedy."

And even for their sheets and blankets:

"My traffic
is sheets; when the kite builds, look to
lesser linen."

Thanks to Shakespeare's Cassius, Warwick and Autolycus - and other legends of the English countryside - the red kite was hunted close to extinction.

In truth, the bird was always more wing  than body.

It has no power on the ground.

It needs 'crows and ravens' to cut up its food.

The first beak to find a dead lorry driver on the M40 is never going to be a kite's.

There is no danger  to anyone stuck on the Stokenchurch stretch - except game birds, foxes and hedgehogs that are already dead.

But you need a good two hours in traffic to appreciate what we were missing all those years.