Flight of fancy dawns for the swallow
On the Seven Heads, where we had seen clouds of painted lady butterflies arrive from Morocco in late June, red admiral and small tortoiseshell butterflies were abundant, and swallows were gathering in flocks, ready to leave for Africa. A thousand or more skimmed the golden gorse and purple heather on the headland over Foilarea Bay. My brother wondered which one would be first to fly out over the sea? He’d brought the good weather from Spain, and was seeing Ireland as we rarely see it.
They would fly out over Biscay, then over the Straits of Gibraltar, the Sahara Desert, the rainforest of the Congo, the Namib Desert and finally arrive in Botswana and Lesotho, these swallows born in Irish barns. A little inland, hundreds were perched on telephone wires and through the binoculars, I saw that most were young birds with short tails and fledgling gapes; a keen observer of such things tells me he has noted swallows only three days out of the nest joining the flock for the 3,000 mile flight.
