WINTER’S WILDLIFE A spring blast of feathery energy
with
RESILIENT
Sand martins dodging snowflakes in a biting gale is one of those absurd scenes that can happen at Easter in the UK, even when it falls in mid-april.
Whatever the weather has in store this holiday weekend, resilient little martins will be defying the elements as they arrive from tropical wintering grounds.
Watching them fly over frosty gravel pits or wind-whipped reservoirs is an uplifting sight that reminds us of the turning of the seasonal clock.
Although their dowdy brown plumage lacks the dazzling tones of electric blue barn swallows, these bundles of feathery energy can stake a claim as being a true harbinger of spring.
A look at average arrival dates of migrating birds at the south coast’s Portland Bird Observatory reveals sand martins are in third place behind wheatears and chiffchaffs, turning up around March 25, four days before the first swallows.
How these tiny marvels, which weigh the same as a AAA battery, power their way across the unforgiving Sahara, over the Mediterranean and through continental Europe stretches belief.
Little wonder they sound so relieved as they arrive in the UK with an explosion of gabbling twitters, before skimming across open water to gorge on calorie-rich midges.
In North America, sand martins are called bank swallows, an indicator of their colonial nest sites in soft earth by rivers, cliffs or railway cuttings.
Conservation efforts this side of the Atlantic in supplying artificial nest holes, along with the proliferation of sand pits and gravel workings, have helped sand martin numbers increase in recent times.
Severe droughts in the Sahel region of sub-saharan Africa back in the late 1960s almost wiped out the British wintering sand martin population, reducing it by as much as 60 per cent.
Further steep dips over subsequent decades saw the martin amber listed as a species of conservation concern, but the recent uptick has seen it moved to the green list, with around 70,000 nests.
How the tiny marvels power across the Sahara stretches belief