birds of passage

Summer is definitely icumen in.  I haven't heard any cuckoos myself yet, but some people I saw on Sunday heard one the day before.  What I have seen is house martins.  We strolled down to the farm for a pre-lunch constitutional, and there they were, little birds with white flashes on their rumps, paddling in a very muddy puddle by the lettuce farm car park, and darting back up to the neighbours' eaves.

They build every year on both halves of the semi-detached cottages down the lane from us, and every year I feel envious that they don't build on our house, but they don't.  We must have the wrong sort of eaves, or they don't like the timber cladding, or the cats, or it is too far from the puddle.  Who knows.  The cottages are rendered in pebble dash, painted cream, which must make a nice, knobbly surface for the mud nests to stick to.  Perhaps our wooden walls are too smooth.

They nest along the front of the cottages, which faces roughly east, and the nearest neighbour's end gable, which faces north.  They appear to have tried virtually every inch of the eaves for size, since there is an almost continuous smear of mud along the top of the walls, about six inches down from the soffit boards.  They then select a few places in which to proceed to build entire nests, the apex of the gables apparently being the prime spot.  The neighbours seem proud and happy to have them, in spite of the mud, and I am sure never knock down the nests from one year to the next, but I noticed that by this spring there weren't many left.  I wonder whether in the extreme wet weather at the start of the year they simply dissolved and ran down the walls in muddy streaks, or disintegrated.

At the garden I went to see on Monday there was a wren's nest in the shed where they keep their lawn tractor.  That's pretty classy in the wild bird nest stakes.  Ah well, we do not have wrens or house martins.  Instead, we have to make do with the starlings, who are by now sending copious streaks of white droppings down the wall under their nest hole, and on to the Chaenomeles by the outside tap.  Fortunately I like starlings very much, but have to admit that they don't have the kudos of some other species.  Avian geezers, starlings.