Growing up in the seventies, I rarely saw a bird of prey. There were tawny owls and occasional kestrels, but that was it. Other predatory birds had been shot, poisoned or the shells of their eggs disintegrated by pollution. Now, hardly a day goes by without the exhilarating sight of a red kite drifting over my garden.

With a five-foot wingspan, it floats like no other bird, twitching its deeply forked tail by the faintest degree to turn and twist. Ash grey-headed and russet red-bellied, it makes the air seem buoyant as water.

Often, I hear the kite’s keening call before I see it. Partway between a melodious whistle and a mournful wail, it is the call that gave the bird its Old English name more than ten centuries ago. But the last English kites were exterminated some 200 years ago, when gamekeepers waged war on every predator in the countryside.

Now red kites are in the vanguard of a bird of prey renaissance. Today, I see sparrow hawks all the time and circling with the kites are buzzards, too. Barn owls hunt rats around Tesco’s car park and, twice, I’ve even had a peregrine falcon chase pigeons down our street.

I have nature conservation to thank for it. In 1989 as a young reporter, I joined a handful of bird experts who had raised young red kites for release into the Chiltern Hills, along a dramatic chalk escarpment North West of London. At the time, the last, small, in-bred population of red kites was hanging on in Wales. Any kites that had been brave enough to venture further afield had been killed, so the Welsh birds had learned to go nowhere.

It was a dismal state of affairs. Red kites were once protected for helpfully keeping our city streets free of dead cats, butchers’ off cuts and other human detritus. They also, bizarrely enough, would pinch clothes to decorate their nests. As Shakespeare warned in A Winter’s Tale: “When the kite builds, look to lesser linen.” However, their scavenging habits made red kites easy to kill.

The first birds to fly free in England in 1989 carried radio tags so their progress could be monitored. Soon enough, one was found poisoned and this led, in turn, to the prosecution of a gamekeeper whose shed contained enough toxins to kill plenty of people, let alone wildlife.

But many keepers soon came to appreciate that birds of prey posed little threat to their game compared to disease, parasites and hard weather. Nearly 100 kites were released and in the safety of their wake came buzzards and other birds of prey from refuges in the west.

It is a rewarding time for bird watching. Ravens have returned to the Chilterns, black tumblers in the sky and brilliantly clever. At least three pairs of goshawk have nested in the surrounding area in the last three years. These powerful birds are equally capable of running down a wood pigeon in mid-air and a rabbit on the ground.

Last month, a nesting ledge was installed for peregrine falcons on the hideous county council office block in my local market town: a pair of peregrines has been picking off the pigeons and starlings for a year and now looks set to breed.

Without the red kite reintroduction, many birds of prey might still be scarce. There are still threats: in 2006, two local keepers were convicted of killing a buzzard. This year, inexplicably, the goshawks are nowhere to be seen.

Still, the red kites are an emblem of success. They are now being released in new places in Britain, providing easily the most exciting visitor to the bird table. I feed ours with raw trimmings from Sunday joints, to provide the best nutrition. The extraordinary sight of this huge bird swooshing into my garden is one that I never dreamt of seeing when I was a child.