West Cork homes the spellbinding dance of the house martin bird from tropical Africa

The summer evenings here in our West Cork village is full not of “the linnet’s wings” of WB Yeats’s ‘Lake Isle of Innisfree’ but of house martin’s wings. These birds faithfully come all the way from tropical Africa to nest below the fascia boards on sea-facing houses each year.

They bring a fascinating and heartening insight to the natural world for anyone who cares to look up at them, and their instinctive determination to build a family home and raise a clutch of offspring born in Ireland is to be admired. It is likely that they were born in similar ‘mud huts’ under the same fascia board themselves.

The ‘huts’ resemble something out of traditional Africa, domed shapes constructed of natural material, mud and straw, stuck firmly to the wall with their own saliva.