Just a couple more of Rev. Gilbert White’s eloquent observations on the lives of swallows;
Having described the fledglings as ‘perchers’ because on first leaving the nest they perch on a branch (more often these days a telephone wire) as yet unable to fly White writes (1774) ‘in a day or two they become flyers, but still unable to take their own food, therefore they play about near the place where the dams are hawking for flies, and, when a mouthful is collected, at a certain signal given, the dam and the nestling advance, rising towards each other and meeting at an angle, the young one all the while uttering such a little quick note of gratitude and complacency(!) that a person must have paid very little regard to the wonders of Nature that has not often remarked this feat’.
‘Each species of hirundo drinks as it flies along, sipping the surface of the water, but the swallow alone, in general, washes on the wing, by dropping into a pool for many times together’. I watched one swallow doing this yesterday at Oak Rd. playing fields lake.
The swallow ‘is a bold flyer, ranging to distant downs and commons even in windy weather’.
The swallow ‘by no means builds altogether in chimnies, but very often within barns and out-houses against the rafters’. Given the scarcity of these elements of the built-environment today this might be described as loss of man-made habitat.
Interestingly Rev. White records that swallows ‘usually withdraw (migrate or hibernate, s.p.b.s) about the beginning of October, though some stragglers may appear on at times till the first week of November’. Nowadays (at this latitude) it would be very unusual to see swallows as late as this but, of course, Rev. White was writing of the south coast and it might well be that swallows moving south from northern England take a break before setting-off over the Channel and Bay of Biscay.
(One more blog to follow in this unit of 8, Rev. White and sand-martins – see above illustration).