Category: Birds

Grass starts growing again at about 10°C (50°F) and you can track the movement of that isotherm across Europe from the Mediterranean to the Arctic, a green wave travelling north at about fifty kilometres a day, bringing with it a new season of light, warmth and growth – and a feeling of renewal.  Surfing that green wave are our migrant birds, and none bears a greater freight of these associations than the swallow and the swift, arriving here from southern Africa, respectively in mid-April and in early May.  I eagerly look out for them at their due dates every year, usually returning faithfully to exactly the same place at the same time. And I get a fizzing shot of adrenaline when I first see and hear them back again.  I’m not alone. These two species have been among our traditional spring and summer markers for centuries, welcomed back each year with relief, as the poet Ted Hughes put it, ‘that the globe’s still working’.  

Swallows and swifts were the favourite birds of the eighteenth-century naturalist Gilbert White, who inspired a new tradition in nature writing in Britain.  White was an obscure country curate who lived all his life in the same house in the equally obscure village of Selborne in Hampshire (population about the same as Hollesley).  But his account of the daily changes to nature in his village through the seasons, The Natural History of Selborne (1789), became one of the most widely-read books in the English language, still in print today in multiple editions.  Its attraction was precisely its parochial focus, stressing the richness of the local, the particular and the familiar – or at least what you thought was familiar until you really looked at it.  He urged the importance of deepening one’s knowledge instead of just extending it: ‘Men that only undertake one district are much more likely to advance natural knowledge than those that grasp at more than they can possibly be acquainted with.’ Not in favour of eco-tourism, then!

White was an amateur in its literal sense and he touched a chord with thousands of ordinary people.  He also attracted the admiration of such different figures as Charles Darwin, John Constable, William Wordsworth, George Eliot and Virginia Woolf, all of whom remark on the book’sapparently artless simplicity and charm.  White had effectively invented a new literary genre and so became the patron saint of today’s many nature diarists.  He also kept a daily journal and one of his most striking diary entries is an ecstatic two-word exclamation on 13 April 1768, greeting the first returning swallow to Selborne by its then scientific name:

‘Hirundo domestica !!!‘ (his exclamation marks). 

Jeremy Mynott
April 2025

Who are the world’s greatest architects?  You might nominate the builders of such iconic ancient structures as the Great Pyramid of Giza, the Taj Mahal and the Parthenon, or perhaps modern celebrity-architects like Le Corbusier, Norman Foster and Frank Gehry conjuring up their breath-taking confections of steel and glass.  All extraordinary feats of engineering and imagination on a massive scale.

I’d nominate a bird, though. Quite a common one, and very small –weighing just ten grams (about the weight of two sheets of A4) and only 14cm long (of which more than half is its tail).  There’s the clue: a long-tailed tit.  You can often see loose parties of them in winter flitting through the hedges and trees to work the vegetation for tiny insects and spiders, all the while keeping contact with their family flock through soft, conversational zupp calls and little trills.   They are becoming common garden birds too, clustering round the bird-feeder like a fluffy feathered jacket.  Their nests are usually very well concealed, deep in blackthorn or hawthorn hedges to protect them from predators, but if you ever come across one it is a thing of great beauty.  They construct them from the finest materials – mosses, lichens and feathers (some 1,500 of them in a single nest), all bound together and secured by filigree strands of spiders’ silk.  Just imagine sewing with thread from a spider’s web – and using only your mouth.  The nest is designed in the form of a perfect oval-shaped dome, with a small entrance hole near the top.  It has to satisfy the most stringent building regulations: well insulated enough to maintain a constant temperature for the eggs and young; porous enough to keep the air fresh; capacious and strong enough to hold the female brooding a clutch up to twelve eggs for a fortnight; and then flexible enough to later accommodate the bare, struggling nestlings as they take about another fortnight to grow and fledge.  All this done from instinct and at high speed, with no construction manuals, consultants, specialist assistance or tools.  

No wonder some of the old country names for the long-tailed tit reflect this remarkable architecture: bum-barrel, bush oven, hedge jug, pudding bag and jack-in-a-bottle.  What is even more amazing is that the nest is only occupied for a single season and when the autumn and winter storms come it will be shredded and destroyed.   It’s a work of exquisite natural art designed to fulfil its function just once and then to be replaced and newly constructed again the next year.  Its only permanence comes from this annual re-creation from the template in the bird’s brain. Surely the winner!

Jeremy Mynott
2 April 2024