Summer visitors cut dashing figures

I NOTICE the dozen swallows and house martins, that sat on the wires above the village street in April and May, have multiplied.

30 or more birds now come and go, twittering and preening, and dashing forth to skim the seaside gardens or the channel, the first fledglings helping with a second brood.

They return with beaks bristling with flies and, in the case of the house martins, can easily be seen and timed between excursions. Arriving at their stucco-moulded nests under the eaves, they disappear inside, deliver the meal to the chicks and are on the wing again a split second later.

Now, as they chicks grow, they can sometimes be seen at the entrances. Occasionally, a parent bird enters and stays inside for minutes at a time. Perhaps it is house-keeping between forays.

Our village householders are kind in accepting these summer visitors, and do not knock the nests built beneath the eaves for the sake of appearances. In fact, the nests often fall off naturally or are taken away by rough weather in winter.

Meanwhile, swallows, which are more likely to nest inside, are welcomed as one might welcome the sons and daughters of old friends for, indeed, the same swallow families have been coming to the same sheds and barns for generations. Rita, who runs the village shop, showed me a very cosy swallow nest of woven straw with a cup lined with feathers built on the top of a flower pot in a shed in her yard.

The swifts that arrive in Timoleague every year arrived again but the numbers decrease annually. They nest in the environs of the picturesque 13th century abbey as they have, no doubt, since the now-ruined churches, cloisters, libraries and chapter rooms were first built.

Their ancestors might well have flitted through the riggings of wine ships from Spain moored at the docks opposite before the headwaters of the bay were rendered unnavigable when the 1755 Lisbon earthquake and the consequent tsunami and seismic upheaval lifted the bay floor.

Swifts are daring and dashing flyers and are amongst the most exciting of birds to watch, often hunting in packs, screaming low overhead as they cut swathes through the insects rising on warm summer evenings — although so far this year, warm summer evenings are almost rarer than the swifts. The little sand martins, known by their brown breast band, are the first of our three hirundines to arrive (swifts are not hirundines) reaching Ireland in March and honey-combing earthen banks above local beaches with their three-foot long nesting tunnels.

When I was young, I remember friends and I finding a sand bank pitted with these. Reaching in up to our armpits to get at the eggs, we most often ended up with a gooey mess, for the shells were delicate and the passages barely wide enough to withdraw our closed fists holding them. I well remember feeling the soft warmness of the downy egg chambers deep in the cool darkness of the tunnels.

What vandals we were! But I recall that we stopped, overcome by guilt.

Of course, had we been hungry and the eggs our food source, it would have been another matter. Mankind puts itself first.

Fledgling birds are common now and the other morning a fine young song thrush slammed into one of our windows and broke its neck, either having being catapulted by the strong winds or chased by a sparrowhawk. I ate its fat breast for breakfast next day, rather than discarding it or sharing it with our foundling heron, who still visits daily.

I saw a clutch of pretty young wrens scuttling and fluttering from bush to bush in the darkness of local woods, and I heard of young jackdaws stealing dried dog-food nuts and dipping them in a rain-filled gutter to soften them — clever crows!

My son’s girlfriend, seeing a lobster in a restaurant tank with a large clump of ‘coral’ — pink eggs — attached to its abdomen bought it and together they drove to a deep, rocky shore and released it.

Meanwhile, our German mushroom-picking friend presented me with a box of newly-picked, egg-yolk-yellow chanterelles as I finished reading from my book Dope in the Age of Innocence at the Bantry Literary Festival.

Some onlookers thought they were magic mushrooms, I’m sure!