Swallows home in on a stay in UK
Spring’s true harbingers are arriving to brighten the British countryside with their dashing flights and uplifting twitters.
Over tropical rainforests, across parched deserts, through mountain passes and over stormy seas, the first vanguard of barn swallows have endured nature’s harshest excesses to declare the season of blossom and birdsong.
Early April is the traditional time most birdwatchers get to see their first swallow of the year, inspiring some to recite the old adage about the onset of summer.
True, one swallow does not a summer make but, in these strangest of climatic times, these are words that could easily have been spoken during the first chilly days of January.
The British Trust for Ornithology says this winter up to 12 swallows eked out an existence by eating insects they found lingering on seaweed-draped beaches dotted along the South Coast.
Enduring frigid temperatures flies in the face of the survival strategies adopted by most insect-eating birds, who flee to Africa.
How swallows survive European winters has confounded thinkers throughout the ages. Some thought the birds flew to the Moon in autumn, others believed they hibernated in the muddy bottoms of lakes.
The mystery was solved when solicitor and amateur naturalist John Masefield attached a metal ring to a swallow that had been nesting in the porch of his house in Cheadle, Staffordshire. Some 18 months later, in December 1912, the swallow was caught on a farm in Natal, South Africa, an astonishing 6,000 miles from its English nesting place.
Where the swallows that have been enjoying the relatively balmy conditions of Cornwall and other seaside locations originate from is open to conjecture.
While it is easy to presume they are British swallows evading epic journeys into Africa, they may well have flown from anywhere across their vast range in the Northern Hemisphere.
Central and Northern European blackcaps and chiffchaffs have evolved new migratory strategies that bring them to the UK each winter, so why not the much-loved swallow?