Its the new game of ‘swoop and catch’!

There’s a surprising new rival for Andy Murray – a red kite that can play catch!  This kite, like most birds of prey can, showed amazing aerodynamics when it was catching the tennis ball.  It liked dropping it and then swooping down to catch it in mid-air.  Kites are probably the most agile of our raptors.  Even though it looked as though it was playing a fun game of catch, experts believe that it was practising its hunting skills – either that or it mistook the ball for an egg.  Red kites are mainly scavengers, but they will eat anything from rubbish to young rabbits.  Iain Heslop, aged 51, captured the scene in the Chiltern Hills in Buckinghamshire.