The swallow is a sure sign that summer is here
Swallows are instantly recognisable by their glossy black wings and back, long tail streamers and contrasting white undersides.
I was fortunate enough to visit Uganda on a few occasions. I was excited to land at Entebbe Airport, made famous in the days of Idi Amin. Amin was a military officer who served as president of Uganda from 1971 to 1979. He ruled as a military dictator and is considered one of the most brutal despots in modern world history. Reports of his exploits filled the news during my childhood.
While in Uganda, I also got to see the source of the river Nile but the thing that brought me the most joy was seeing swallows in their winter homeland. I am convinced one or two of them had come from a cow house in the Ox Mountains.
The swallow and his cousins, the house martin and the swift, are common summer visitors throughout Ireland from mid-March to late September. Birdwatch Ireland helps us to identify and distinguish.
Despite the ‘cousin’ reference, swallows are not related to swifts. They do look similar and have evolved the same traits to help them efficiently catch airborne prey. Swifts are extremely fast high fliers. They are known for their unrivalled aerial abilities. They often spend their entire lives on the wing including sleeping, mating, and drinking. On the other hand, the house martin is smaller than swifts or swallows. These are the lads who build in the apex of your gable or under your eave.
Swallows construct bowl-shaped nests out of mud in suitable spots in barns and other outbuildings. While house martins build on your house, swallows build in your rafters. In fact, they are sometimes referred to as barn swallows. Wildbirdwatching.com takes up the story.
Swallow nesting occurs primarily in June and July. Both the male and female build the nest. Working in the morning, swallows will make up to 1,000 trips to collect mud and grasses before nest completion. This is one of the few times you can see them on the ground collecting mud and feathers for their nest.
The female lays three to eight white eggs that are spotted with reddish brown, beginning a few days after the nest is finished. The eggs are incubated by both adults with the female incubating longer because only females have a brood patch. The eggs will hatch after 14 to 16 days of incubation and the young will leave the nest 18 to 23 days after that. Two broods a season may be attempted. Swallows return to the same nest site each season and will sometimes repair their old nest for reuse.
When I was a child, around home, the swallows used our cow house as their main nesting site. I am not sure where they built before 1958 but after that, successive generations of them started their lives high in the rafters over our small congregation of cows.
As well as building the perfect cow house, my father had inadvertently created a cathedral; the perfect nesting place for the swallow. The rafters were high and safe, the atmosphere in the house was moist and warm and all around the trees and the manure heap outside was an endless food supply of midges and flies.
Despite this apparent state of perfection, there remained one major problem. My father’s dislike of cats was matched only by his dislike of swallows. The perfect nest location for a swallow in our cow house was often directly above an unsuspecting cow’s feed trough, sometimes over my father’s head or worst of all, over an open-mouthed milking bucket. While my father loved to sing to the cows at milking time, he was not at all impressed when the out-of-tune swallows from Uganda joined in. An unspoken arrangement seemed to emerge each summer; as my father entered the cow house, the swallows met him at the door on their way out. It took a very agile swallow indeed to get past him as he often approached the door with weapon in hand.
The swallows that were reared in our cow house had a definite advantage in life. Firstly, they had the ideal nesting site. Secondly, they had an endless supply of rich food, and finally, they had survived my father’s best efforts to ‘discourage’ their very existence. As they prepared for their flight to Africa, they were better prepared than any other swallow reared in the Ox Mountains region.
, the BBC wildlife magazine, says that faced with the prospect of little or no food, swallows start to head south during September and October.
It’s no walk in the park for our departing swallows as their extreme migration takes them south through Europe and across the Sahara Desert. They cover approximately 200 miles a day, generally at about 20mph – the maximum flight speed recorded was a whopping 35mph.
In addition to their epic journey, swallows also run the risk of starvation, exhaustion and must cope with extreme weather. Although they fatten up before they leave it is difficult for them to avoid the hazards they will encounter en route. Therefore, swallow populations do fluctuate year on year.
What a lovely phrase to suggest to people not to get their hopes up. Mind you, this summer I have seen precious few swallows. The ones that built their nests in my open shed over the past few years have not returned this year. Some say it is because of the colder than usual early summer, others say it is because we have fewer midges. One way or another, things are changing and the beleaguered swallow seems to be a kind of barometer for it all.
They say it is lucky for a swallow to build in your barn or for a house martin to stick her nest to your gable wall. If you can put up with their poo on your lawnmower or on your footpath, please do. You can always move your mower or make a little shelf to protect your surroundings. In other words, do what you can to make your visitors welcome – they have come a long way to bestow their blessing.
My father is gone now and so is his houseful of cows but that old cow house still stands. I must go there some evening soon to see if the descendants of that ancient tribe of swallows still nest in the rafters, to see if they have survived all the changes and the passage of time, to see if the survival instinct, imposed on them by my father, has served them well.
