There were six of us in the hide. The other five were looking for a jack snipe, but that’s a mug’s game, frankly. The jack snipe was just sitting there, pretending to be a patch of muddy grass. Why look at that when you’ve got a virtuosic aerial ballet company, just arrived from Africa, performing free of charge right in front of you?
Riparia riparia’s back in town.
They’re the forgotten hirundine. Everyone’s excited about swallows (Hirundo rustica – never let it be said that I don’t have your education and enlightenment at heart), and quite right too. Magnificent bird, the swallow. Flashy, streamer tails, phone cable sitters. One of them doesn’t make a summer. I love them. But they’re rather obvious.
And house martins (Delichon urbicum – there’ll be a short quiz at the end of this post), with their glossy blue mantle catching the sun if they bank at the right angle (and they have a habit of doing that, as if they know they’ve got an audience) – they have a glamour all their own. They’re ever so slightly a connoisseur’s bird.
But spare a thought for the sand martin (Riparia riparia – got to love a tautonymic binomial). Nobody ever named a band after them. Nobody ever came up with a nifty epithet about which season one of them doesn’t make. But when you have them right there, performing just for you while other, less enlightened hide-users point their telescopes at a patch of grassy mud, these magnificent little brown darts have an enchantment all their own.
Until, that is, the swifts (Apus apus) arrive early next month – then I forget all about the sand martins. Sorry about that.
What they all have in common, these birds – and where, in my humble opinion, they have it over the jack snipe – is the magnificence, the effortlessness, the sheer bloody virtuosic LOOK AT US WE’RE THE TITS AT FLYING, WE ARE wonder of it all.
They may not be able to invent the wheel, design cathedrals, make lavender bags, temper chocolate, merge mailing lists, bake an olive and rosemary focaccia, write haiku, work out when it’s bins, dance a cha-cha-cha, remember all the words to Tom Lehrer’s Elements Song, do a passable impersonation of Michael Caine or open a bottle of wine using the heel of their shoe, but they can fly, so frankly they win.
We can fly, but we need a lot of help, and the experience is undermined by the whole AAGGHHH WE’RE IN THE AIR IN A METAL TUBE WE’RE NOT SUPPOSED TO BE IN THE AIR IN A METAL TUBE GET ME OFF BEFORE IT GOES SPLAT thing.
But maybe that’s just me.
Anyway, they’re back. They’ve made that miraculous journey from Africa (13cm birds making a 5,000 kilometre flight – the sheer maths alone gives me a headache, and that’s before I’ve got my head round the feat of satnav required to find the same sandbank they nested in last year), and now they’re in front of me, six of them, checking out their nesting holes, making plans for the summer.
So forgive me while I sit in the hide, prop myself up on my elbows, hold my binoculars to my eyes, and gawp.
The jack snipe? (Lymnocryptes minimus – you thought I’d forgotten, didn’t you?) Yeah, I saw it easily enough – looked like a patch of muddy grass.
QUIZ: What is the scientific name NO SCROLLING BACK of the sand martin? And the swallow? And what about the house martin, clever clogs I SAID NO SCROLLING BACK
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Delichon urbicum sounds like something small and sharp-tasting you might find chopped into a salad. Oh, wait, that’s a cornichon, isn’t it? 🙂
100%. Not on the test, just my level of agreement. Thanks Lev.
. . . is the magnificence, the effortlessness. . . . if only photographing them was so effortless! Have wasted a lot of pixels in sessions of trying to photograph them over small pools here in the Algarve this week. Wonderful to be surrounded by hundreds of hirundines and swifts, en route northwards.