Today's brilliant blue skies with hardly a cloud to spoil the sun and temperatures at midday warmer than we've had all summer must have wound up the swallows because suddenly the air was full of them, thirty or more, flying at frantically high speeds, chasing each other, screeching in excitement, until a group landed on and around the north eave of our house where they started to display exactly the same behaviour as they did in mid-August a year ago - see post here - when....
....they began to fly up to and investigate the remains of the nest abandoned by a pair of house martins earlier that summer. Visiting it seemed to excite them the more until...
....they were joined by a flight of house martins in a new game which involved some of them landing on a branch of our cherry tree and others swooping at them; and it seemed to involve both species equally. There are five birds in this picture, at least one of which is a swallow.
A few minutes later they all disappeared, though they kept returning, flying low around the house and through the garden and between the trees, until a new group, this time house martins, decided it was their turn to investigate the abandoned nest.
It's the first time I have seen swallows and martins 'playing' together, and I wonder whether there is some serious reason behind their games. Obviously, the speeding and the acrobatics are part of the process of getting fit for a very long journey, but do the two species co-operate along the way? Do they, for example, form mixed groups as they fly south, perhaps to help pace each other, or even to find the way? And why the interest in the old nest?
From their behaviour this was swallows and martins which knew our house, so they're local, not birds of passage from north of here. They're at least a fortnight behind last year, probably because we've had fine weather recently and a least some insects in the air, but they're bound to be leaving soon. Au revoir!
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