Red kites and ravens swooped through Elizabethan London – and helped keep the city clean
We sometimes think of cities as concrete deserts inhabited only by humans, pigeons and rats. But that has never been true. In London, for example, the streets are lined with plane trees, foxes come out at night, and starlings and house sparrows whistle from the rooftops. If you’ve driven on the M4 motorway out of the UK capital you might have spotted something bigger picking at roadkill. Common ravens and red kites are larger than hawks and falcons, and though they may peck at the city’s outskirts today, in the time of Shakespeare and the Great Plague they were common inside London too.
Source: theconversation.com