A note to compliment the last blog but unfortunately no photo. The late Joe Curtis of Barton once told me that the migrating swallows arrived on 14th April and the migrating swifts on the 14th May. Although about right I think the date varies somewhat according to weather conditions.
At the moment the swifts are ‘screaming’ overhead trying to get fattened-up ahead of their mid-August migration south to sub-Saharan Africa – probably finding it difficult as all the rain we have had will have reduced volume of insects on the wing, yet another deluge overnight and tomorrow forecast to rain all day. The belief that swifts mate and sleep on the wing seems to be true, although like a lot of animals sleep takes the form of ‘naps’, whereas humans need, it seems, blocks of uninterrupted sleep. If driven to the ground by some misadventure swifts are almost helpless and destined to perish. However they do have ‘claws’ by which they can cling to the walls of buildings and rely on access crevices in buildings to create a nest. So soon it’s goodbye for another year to the swifts, any early leavers finding at the moment around the Mediterranean temperatures of 40 degrees plus!
Swallows numbers here usually decline in the first and second week of the new school year. Maybe some students wish they were swallows.