All the buttons in us are pushed announcing summer is here with the arrival of our swallows. Some years they turn up in May to build adobe
nests in our barn from the mud collected in puddles and the edges of the pond.
The last few years they have come earlier during April. Its always thrilling when the first bird arrives and dives straight into the barn to check out last years nests and chatter greetings as he flies around the yard awaiting arrival of his mate. Awesome feelings well up when we stand in admiration after their winter journey to Africa and back, happy at last to greet old friends.
One of our daily delights before breakfast is as we walk through the summer grass
in the paddocks with dogs running and horses galloping through clouds of
butterflies when we turn them out from overnight stables to
graze, our swallows already skimming between the buttercups and wispy
long grass stalks of seed heads, now around our legs and under the horse's belly. Daily routines intimately exploited by these elegant blue coated creatures of
delight, they buzz our legs to snatch a flushed insect with unexpected audible
thwacks when close enough to hear. Doesn't it hurt their tiny beaks?
Our bedroom, opposite the barn, from dawn is filled with
sunlight and the happy sounds of our twittering visitors, so conversational, full of pleasure,
joyfully raising broods of young, our early morning music as we come awake
slowly drowsing early summer mornings. Usually each year at least one of the
growing flock will make a mistake and fly into the house through our open
window, needing rescue as it panics itself into clattering against glass panes trying
to find an exit. One evening it was a bat whirling between the beams - Jenny dived under the sheets with orders that it had to be caught, no doubt it would have become entangled in her hair? Ever tried catching a bat? They know how to fly and in the end it was a case of opening all windows wide until it happened to find a clear path for its sonar and it was out in the yard again, no doubt feeding its young under the thatch.
The whole place is busy at breeding time. For a few weeks in Spring background sound starts with my Jerkin calling for my attention long before I
am out of bed, sometimes hecking at the early morning visit of muntjack raiding garden tulips and other tender shoots. In his seasonal excitement he often starts at
4.15 giving me concern that neighbours in the village might complain but nobody
has. As the season progresses a month or so later the calls of screaming
eyasses demanding breakfast from their mother take over but it is the sounds of
swallows in their early morning conversations in the barn roof that cheer and unlock the emotions of summer. When
the first brood nears fledging there is much excitement and swallow chatter, parents re-nest with excited mating for the new clutch of eggs, a second
and sometimes even a third round of breeding. One pair might produce eighteen
young to make the journey to Africa.
We often lunch under the parasol in the yard by the barn
doors with busy swallows flying in and out, feeding their young. Our weather
this year has been consistently warm and pleasant, farmers are delighted with
harvest almost completed by the end of July and crop yields 25% increased. It
is amazing how many changes agriculture has brought to our countryside. Sadly
the village swifts have left early, along with the house martins and we are
wondering whether our swallows are to follow on fledging of the second
clutches? Unusually the first round youngsters have disappeared when in other
years they have helped with feeding the following brood. Its unavoidable to notice that their food supply has gone as familiar insect life has been eliminated not
by familiar sprays but by far more efficient seed dressings that change the whole
plant. This summer we can drive around the county and come home without one
insect having been splatted on the car! Not many years ago it was usual for my car lights to be dimmed by the buildup of dead bodies, the windscreen impossibly
smeared but today we have clean lifeless air. Boys used to earn pocket money working at the filling station cleaning windscreens as customers filled up with petrol. We are offered comfort by one scientific
research project after another assuring us of the well being of our countryside, of the amazing research projects demonstrating survival of wildlife, somewhere.
Reality is the food chain is broken, our fields have
become the factory politicians and economists dreamed of and all other life is
eliminated whilst increased production is not for food but for energy. In Spring I worked my setters in the spring corn and rape as I have done for many years for the pleasure of seeing partridge, pheasants, hares, skylarks and many small birds living in harmony with our agriculture, our farmers known as 'guardians of the countryside'. But this year there were no points, vast acreages devoid of life, not even a pipit did we find. A silent spring.
Meanwhile our Swallows are driven away, in the evenings the sky is empty, screaming families of Swifts no longer thrive in our village, House Martins and Swallows have no food, and silence
prevails at the height of summer.
