Are there fewer swallows than ever before?

I READ with interest the article by Horatio Clare about the low number of swallows that have arrived in Britain this year (Mail). I live in a village on the Norfolk and Suffolk border and due to the lockdown have spent more time in my garden than normal and have become interested in the visiting birds. A week ago, I would have agreed with Mr Clare because I had not seen any swallows. But suddenly there are a large number darting around the sky. Perhaps, as he suggests, they were late starting their migration from South Africa or the bad weather over Greece has reduced their numbers.

ALF SKIPPEN, Ditchingham, Norfolk.

I WAS surprised that Mr Clare failed to mention the loss of habitat for swallows. When I was a boy in the 1940s, we would picnic by Millers brook on the outskirts of Coventry. Each year we would see scores of swallows dipping into the banks and shallows of the river to collect mud. They carried it to nearby farm buildings where they made their nests high up on the walls. All of this has gone to make way for a housing estate. The stream is now in an underground concrete pipe. Modern farms don’t need to be beside rivers, as they used to, and are no longer covered in mud and muck. Health and safety has seen to that and deprived swallows of their building materials.

LOL WADDINGTON, Nuneaton, Warks.

IF HORATIO Clare wants to see swallows, he should come to my corner of southwest Cheshire. I have never seen so many. There were at least two dozen hopping about on my roof the other morning and many more flying around. What a wonderful sight! And I heard my first cuckoo for at least five years.

JOHN BROMLEY-DAVENPORT, Malpas, Cheshire.