You say goodbye and I say hello

Something is missing above Walls Farm.

We still have blue skies; we still have warm breezes.

What we don’t have is our swallows.

I am still seeing a few around on the coast and in occasional groups heading south over the Levels.

But our local population has gone.

There was the usual hubbub whizzing around the garage and up by the pond last weekend (12/13th September).

Then, our swallows got even more twitchy.

Perhaps there were larger groupings on the overhead wires that line the lanes around our house – I hadn’t been paying that much attention.

This must have been ‘zugunruhe’ a restlessness that becomes migratory birds just when it is time to migrate and head south - or indeed north as the case may be.

I would like to say that I was familiar with the word ‘zugenruhe’ but I wasn’t. I was told of it by Dominic Couzens a charming fellow, a writer and ornithologist friend of Stephen’s whom I had met a couple of years ago at one of Stephen’s end of summer barbecues – a sort of gathering of the great and the good of the birding world – an exclusive if somewhat compact gathering.

I had told Dominic of an unusual sight I had recently witnessed in the fields that surround Walls Farm, when a large flock of swallows had seemed to swarm around in what appeared to me like some sort of feeding frenzy, flying in tighter and tighter circuits around the field.

Boom - then they were gone.

“What you witnessed was ‘zugenruhe’, he said, first described in the early 1800s by an early German naturalist called Johann Andreas Naumann”.

I was impressed, however, the blankness across my face and my open mouth must have spoken volumes.

This happened on the 11th of September 2017.

I had also noted in my nature diary that the swallows had gone by the 14th September in 2015, the 13th of September in 2016. I had no record in 2018. However, in 2019 they were gone by the 15th, and this year, 2020, they left on the 13th.

An amazing coincidence or just another wonder of nature?

These beautiful little birds that share their spring and summer with us know almost to the day when it is time to depart.

Zugenruhe – probably best not to try and understand it completely – life would be so much duller if we knew everything.

That said, I am sure much will be revealed when Stephen’s new book ‘The Swallow: A Biography’ comes out just in time for Christmas – no doubt available from all good bookshops…

Christmas is coming…