With the swifts long gone (save very few late breeders) the house martins take centre stage above the house. Our airspace has been full of them, many are this year’s juveniles; I suspect most are from elsewhere as they visit different nests besides those used by this year’s breeding pairs. They also perch on the walls, sometimes in groups of up to twenty. These ‘clinging’ sessions are usually instigated by adult birds who perch first followed by juveniles. Are they from the wider locality or migrants stopping for a rest? Questions we cannot answer. What is clear is that the numbers involved in these gatherings are far in excess of the numbers that return to our colony the following year. I wish it were a guarantee of breeders the next year but they often gather on houses where no nests appear the following spring; as is often the case with house martins there is much mystery about their behaviour.
House martins epitomise summer for me, though they give so much pleasure in spring and into early autumn too; we have almost six months of the year with their calls filling the air above our house. They often arrive by the Easter holiday, then stay right through the summer term, all through the long summer holidays and finally leave a few weeks after children have returned to school!
To some house martins are overshadowed by swifts, yet seen without the comparison house martins’ manoeuvrability and accuracy in flight is astonishing to watch. When feeding young adults fly up to the nests and sometimes don’t even land, they briefly hover by the entrance to pass the food and then ascend quickly again to fetch more insects. For a while after the young have fledged they sometimes pass food to their young in the air.
I have known house martins for much longer than I have known swifts. They nested on our house during my childhood and readily took to my home made chicken wire and gummed paper nests. I placed them above and beside my bedroom window for the best possible views of their gorgeous inky blue and glaring white plumage. I can recall nests all over our home town of Hungerford; I would plot them on a map each year. Some were by my walking route to school and I admired their structure and loved watching their behaviour, a welcome distraction from contemplating double maths later that day. They were a rich part of my childhood between April and September year in year out; the excitement of watching them has never waned.
Now I find myself on the committee of the brilliant new charity House Martin Conservation UK and Ireland, with like minded individuals driven with a sense urgency to conserve the species’ worrying decline. Something that occurred to me recently is that so many people have never even seen a house martin let alone a nest. In many former breeding areas house martins are no longer a familiar sight on a walk to school or a familiar sound chattering in nests built near bedroom windows. So a large part of our mission is telling people about house martins and very often showing them a house martin for the first time. To this end I have a sign by our front gate with an identification guide and information about the species. The nice thing about this is people can then look at our house and see house martins coming and going to the nests and so they learn to identify the species and can see that conservation in the form of artificial nests really works.
As the end of the house martin season approaches I reflect on a better year than the last one. At least 32 young house martins have fledged from our artificial nests. I would hate to see a world where all house martins use artificial nests, but for the time being we are acting as a predator proof hub to maximise breeding potential at a time of serious decline. Many of our house martin fledglings will breed elsewhere and hopefully delight other people with their beautiful plumage, flight and calls in summer 2024.
All text and images copyright Jonathan Pomroy 2023