“And summer’s lease hath all too short a date . . .”
Mercifully, house martins don’t read Shakespeare. Yes, the nights are drawing in, the swifts have already left and swallows are gathering on the telegraph wires, but our house martins are just hatching a second brood. As I write I can see them bullet up to their nest under the gable. Each trout-like dart blends accuracy, grace and speed. They’ll be with us until October, extending summer’s expiry date well into autumn.
I fell in love with house martins as a boy. My grandparents might have had the smallest house in the village (the same Yorkshire village where we live now) but they had what you couldn’t buy — house martins. That mud-cup nest, brimming with life and almost low enough for grandpa to peer into, transformed their two-bedroom bungalow into a fairytale castle. Had these little birds really travelled the whole world just to be here? What wonders had they seen on their journey?
The mystery surrounding the epic African journey undertaken by these little bottle-nosed, blue-black travellers remains. To this day scientists don’t know exactly where they go in winter. Conventional tracking devices can’t be used. Light as they are, geolocators fatally impede the birds during migration. The current thinking is that they spend winter high above the African rainforests, sleeping on the wing. Last night we listened to the house martin family chirping, chirring and whirring until well after midnight. Their gable nest is only five yards and a window away from our bedhead — the sound of the sky brought to the pillow.
Nationally, house martins are on the amber list for Birds of Conservation Concern, and I’m one of hundreds of people who volunteered to help the British Trust for Ornithology (BTO) to find out why. In a countrywide house martin survey, volunteers have been allotted randomly generated 1km squares, our mission — to count active nests.
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Wild flowers squared
I’m in charge of two of these 1km squares, and my first contains a mosaic of tall-hedged fields, some stone byres and a meandering country lane. Biking along the lane last week, the uncut verges flashed with flowers. If I’d signed up to do the plantlife survey, another wonderful piece of “citizen science”, there would have been lots to record: meadow cranesbill; the flickering neon blues of tufted vetch; towers of teasel leaning sharply as though under the weight of their butterflies; and the dreaming spires of mugwort nodding in my wake.
Getting off my bike, I approached a head-height clump of aromatic mugwort. For a rather plain, often dusty plant, mugwort boasts a fascinating history. Its name holds the clue. One of the nine Anglo Saxon “charm herbs”, it was used to flavour beer in the days before hops. Its other names are equally evocative if less clear: poor man’s baccy; old uncle henry; and felon weed. More flowers loved by bees flashed past as I rode on — hemp agrimony, burdock, knapweed — but not a single house martin.
Arresting sight
By contrast, my second BTO square, in our local market town Thirsk, yielded lots of house martins, as well as nearly earning me a criminal record.
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Binoculars scanning, notebook to hand, I was recording the large colony behind the cobbled town square when a terse voice demanded: “What are you doing, sir?”
I turned to find a special police constable looking quizzically at me. The colony was on a branch of Barclays Bank. Fortunately, a quick explanation exonerated me of planning a heist.
Thirsk has other colonies too. I was particularly happy to see the nests of house martins foaming under the white plastic soffits of the modern development by the race course. But not everyone’s so happy.
On one housing estate a formidable array of house martin deterrents dangle from the gables: CDs, metal chains, even strips of white bin-liners pulsing on the breeze like suburban jelly fish. Is this any way to welcome a little bird that seeks us humans out?
For it’s no accident that my first, more rural, square kilometre was empty — it contains no houses. Until a few hundred years ago these birds nested in caves and cliffs, but by the 19th century they’d thrown their lot in with us, nesting almost exclusively on human structures. A species that actually prefers our company!
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Isn’t it our duty to make house martins welcome? Instead of deterrents, blamed by the BTO for causing the bird numbers to dwindle, let’s have street parties when they arrive and prizes for houses with the most nests.