SMALL BUT DEADLY?The hobby falcon, our smallest falcon, is agile enough to take a swallow on the wing.
Swallows leaving us once more
Country sights and sounds
John Shelley
Every autumn we are treated to the sight of thousands of swallows gathering over the lake, readying themselves for take-off. They generally roost in the extensive growth of bulrushes, six or eight of them to each stem. It suits them to sleep like this, all bunched up together, not so much to keep warm, but so that the rushes bend so far as to be horizontal. One bird alone is far too light to achieve the desired result; half a dozen or so working together get it just about right, and make a nice comfortable perch for each other.
This year there are not thousands of swallows. I don’t know why this is, for there seem to be good numbers of them elsewhere. In some places there are still young ones confined to the nest and as these take to the wing the meagre gathering that entertains us at present will increase a little. After a slow start, the summer turned out well for them, with untold millions of insects hatching each and every day. A feast indeed!
Well, I’ve been out in my boat, pretending to look for trout but really hoping to see the huge flocks of these migratory birds that I have grown used to. Every other year I’ve had them swooping around my head at dusk. On fine evenings they follow the flies high into the sky; when the weather is cold and damp they hunt low over the water.
In the past we even used to flight pattern of the swallow to foretell weather conditions for the morrow. ‘Swallows high, staying dry’ was the proverb reverberating in the minds of country folk looking anxiously skyward as they contemplated their continuing harvest. Sir Humphrey Davy, an acclaimed scientist, took a little of the fun out of this when he reported evident facts: ‘Swallows follow the flies and gnats, and flies and gnats usually delight in warm strata of air.’
Sir Humphrey recorded his observance nearly 200 years ago. To this day warm updraughts of air still carry the insects high – the warmer the higher – and the swallows must follow if they are to feed. We shall still go and look for our birds. Always they are dramatic, clever, bold and fearless in flight.
Around dusk the sparrowhawks come out from their woody home to snatch one of the starling flock, but now the starlings have finally rumbled that something is not right and have moved, en masse, to the other end of the lake, leaving the hawks with no option but to look for other birds to eat. They never seem to bother with the swallows though. I imagine these latter would be far too fast for even the swiftest of hawks.
The starlings will return at some stage. Wherever they go they attract predators and when they get fed up with all the attention they move somewhere else. It might help their cause if they were to go quietly to roost rather than advertising their presence to all by flying back and forth in a great congregation for thirty minutes or more at the end of each day, as is their way. I don’t mind in the least that they have left, even for a while. Each time the newsman mentions Avian flu I find it disconcerting to have tens of thousands of birds camped out only yards from my front door.
There is one small bird of prey fast enough and agile enough to take a swallow and that is our smallest falcon, the hobby. These are scarce enough; in fact, I never saw one clearly enough to identify it. They are about though – of this we can be certain. One of the hobby’s favourite foods is the dragonfly, another spectacular aeronaut. The hobby hunts the dragonfly in the same way that the dragonfly hunts the smaller insects that make up its own diet, in flight, before taking its prey to a favourite perch.
An accumulation of dragonfly wing and body parts around a fence post close to Murrisk tells me there are hobbys at large. They are on the list of things to do and things to find – a list that grows more and more extensive as time goes by.
Our Tame the Badger project has been undone by a stray dog, a villain who hides in the bushes and steals their food as soon as my back is turned.
