Sleeping with swallows
Touching base with the birds. Fostering acrobats. The magic of predator-free shelter in the Summer of the Birds.
Welcome to this week’s Vineyard Tales. Memoir and nature from the Cava vineyards.
‘Have you seen the sun? It’s a weird red ball!’ Yes, I thought, as I stared at it, how could you not notice.
The sun hung there, suspended and sulking, muffled red for two whole days like a bloodshot eye. As a friend agreed, ‘It was an evil-looking sun’. I have not been spooked by the sky before. Not that way.
While the judgemental eye watched us we had extraordinarily high humidity. You could feel it when you breathed in. For the first time ever the washing on the line got wetter without it raining. I remember a friend describing the humidity in Hong Kong and thought maybe this was the same. It’s always been hot and sweaty here in the summer, but this year it’s different.
I wondered if the air was heavy with smoke from the forest fires burning out of control on the other side of the country. One thing for sure, the sky was in a suffocating mood.
‘Hot?!?’
Understatement.
‘Boiling!’ I say, as I stare sleepily over my coffee at the olive tree from the kitchen window. Of course I’m grateful for the air conditioning, the ceiling fans and solar panels we finally got round to installing a year ago in desperation, but now I feel guilty on these hottest days. They say emissions from cooling are set to double by 2030 and triple by 2050. It’s yet another climate conundrum. ***
‘Huh! I’m alright, but what about the olive tree? But what about the birds!?’ The Sardinia warblers, the bee-eaters, the swallows? How do they take a rest from the heat?
Yes the birds. It’s officially The Summer Of The Birds, when nature and our family have finally shared a roof, or better said, one balcony. My office used to be a water tank. Now that might sound unglamourous, and it is built like a bunker, but it is also beautifully quiet and I love it. My room faces west, and while I type this summer under the overhang of the balcony above, on the top of the slatted door, flung open wide for air, sits a baby swallow. Yes this afternoon I share my view with two tiny, black, sparkling eyes.
We’ve always wanted our house to be a home to the birds. Swallows and swifts circle in the sky all day, but we never saw any nests. Trying to tempt them closer, five years ago, we bought man-made swallow nests. We knew from the outset it could take years for birds to move in, if at all. The artificial hollows, looking much like a push up bra, are still empty, waiting, perched high up under the rafters on the other side of the house. I later realised, instead of importing them from Germany, we could have just made some rounded nests out of clay with our own hands because swallows are one of the few birds that makes its nest from mud.
The high-flying group of birds made up of swifts, swallows and martins, so adept at flying a mile up or more, are declining in population. Especially swifts, with a 66% decline in thirty years in England. A whole community in Somerset is patiently united in their struggle to get swifts back to nesting in old buildings. Even Wells cathedral has brick box nests waiting in the belfry.**
Two years ago, we put solar lights under the balcony which arch from hooks in a line. Just when we least expect it our acrobatic swallow friends have been swooping in to land on the predator-free wire. I love how these highfliers swoop in under the balcony, their sharp, fast- fluttering, triangular wings are beautifully at odds with their soft-edged, curved paths of flight, flying in a ‘bend-it-like-Beckham’ kind of way. That swoop is apparently essential; all the birds in this group fly so fast they have to use the upwards curve to slow themselves down ‘on approach’.
It all began in a baptism of wire, back in mid-July. A small flock of birds flew and chirped and gossiped and sang and landed and even pooped over the cotton awning over the lounge. It seemed like a bird conference with parents and chicks and lots of cousins allocating roosting sites. Ever since that day, six swallows have roosted every night on the hemp rope below. They sit there, hiding behind a tarpaulin lip from a short section of the awning. Cute and quiet, they wobble in the wind every night, like a string of worry beads.
They have grown. Their tuning fork tails are longer and sharper. Their tummies are whiter. The nest, wherever it is, is far too small for sure. They play and chase food in the skies all day, every day and when one pops in for a rest at midday, standing on the top of my door, I wonder if they have been racing or had competitions in the sky or are even playing hide ’n seek. Maybe quite simply, they are showing their young age and have come down for a breather in the shade.
‘Dear birds, if only we could talk!!’ What stories they could to tell! Then again, maybe they don’t have time to chat. Flying in and out of our balcony, could be a tight, flight-training schedule. Are they practicing flying back to base using their magnetic, latitude tracker,? Is this preparing them for the long-haul flight they will do before Mum and Dad even set off themselves.
They queue for bedtime above the street when the sun starts to turn pink. They chirp on the telephone wires that meet in a spaghetti junction above the corner of our garden. That’s their ‘community café’, their local haunt. They seem happy; each chirpy sentence rattles with energy and ends in a fun, clockwork up-winding twist.
Dad tells me they will be off soon. Back to Africa. Maybe I don’t need to worry about them in this heat after all, maybe they like the heat more than I can understand! Some nights there are only four, but I think the whole family is six siblings. One cool night, the only night in months that the temperature sunk to twenty degrees after a storm, they slept tightly snuggled up, facing the wall, but usually they face either way and sleep a wingspan apart.
Another night I clumsily moved a metal ladder on the terracotta tiles. The sound ricocheted and screeched through the night air. As I came down to water a plant, one bird flew off. By midnight it was still missing. I hoped with all my heart it would return. It took almost a week but eventually there were six little worry beads roosting again on the wire.
Every morning I find of course a scattered line of dried pips of poop. It sticks to the floor in a pattern not dissimilar to fairy lights. Appropriate really when the birds don’t weigh much more than a lightbulb themselves. If I scuff my shoe it scatters into dust, like ash. This ash is the wings and skeletons of digested mosquitos. These birds are saviours. My allies. They breakfast on the one thing that can really spoil a summer. I read they can eat up to sixty mosquitos an hour, that’s eight hundred a day! It’s a perfect symbiosis. The poop is a small price to pay. Poop-wise, it’s only for a few weeks of the summer too and it takes only a minute to clear up I tell myself.
It isn’t just me who has been moved by their presence. Everyone in the family smiles when they turn the corner on the outdoor steps and peep under the awning in the dark to see our extended family. There they are, in hushed silence, our companions, sitting between lightbulbs glowing softly on solar power. We count them every night, like a family abacus. Six feathered beads. One day soon though, the maths will come to zero. It's nearly September, when they set off to fly a shocking six thousand miles to Africa. Time is running out; every day I wonder how long we have left to enjoy these angels.
Today the sunlight is glowing a strange yellow on the ground. Why so yellow? Is it tinted by the fires in the west of the country? My heart aches watching the news, hectares of land burning, ancient forests, historic villages gone, smoking out the population, like bees in an unwanted hive, a hive the size of metropolitan London, or the size of Mallorca I read too. One fire they say, was started by a teenager angry with his parents. He will have recently learned then, that in this country you go to prison for starting a forest fire, accident or not. Make that twenty years if there is loss of life. I’m told they are the strictest fire ‘prevention’ laws in Europe.
The end of August is nigh. There is a noisy wind today after another midnight thunderstorm. Change is in the air. If I can feel it, for sure the birds can; their instincts are not muffled by perfume and windows separating them from the earth. It's still relatively warm; my computer is still on Post-it stilts to keep it cooler, I’m still typing in a bikini, but the cicadas start screaming later in the morning and we don’t need the aircon now. It’s boiling but doable. Yes, we are on the other end of summer although I still hold my breath at the sound of a helicopter in the distance or the faint smell of smoke. I look out from the top of the hill as I breathe a sigh of relief, thankful that one more day of summer has passed without going up in smoke.
I can’t help but think that maybe the birds are safer gone even if I will miss their busy-ness, their chatter and fun. Better they keep to their instincts, even if over-urbanisation has scuppered ours. Before these pocket-sized, cross-continent trapeze champions go, I have an overwhelming desire to write next to them. I’m not sure why. I tried to record their chatter, but my computer fuzzed in the heat and ruined the sound. I lay on the sofa outside this morning and waited for them to come back but of course they didn’t.
We can fly to the moon but we’ll never control the birds. We’ll not be telling mother nature what to do either. It feels as though birds are a symbol of the free spirit we all possess and often forget we have. As I sit up and give up on ‘Swallow Watch’, I hear,
‘You’ll have to wait till sunset’, says my husband walking towards me. ‘They’ll all be here again then’.
Yes, I think I will try to sleep with the swallows tonight. I know they are free spirits, but I would love to connect in some way; if it can only be by sharing the same pocket of night air, watching the same stars, feeling the same breeze on my skin as they do. Maybe the closeness will teach me something new. Maybe I will become a little wiser by sharing dusk with them?
I more than wonder if humankind would be more understanding if we slept closer to nature occasionally. If we could just remember how much we share in order to live. We could in this way, nurture the sense of freedom that is born in us, rather than translate it into an unfettered desire for territory and possessions.
At 6.30am I sit on the corner of the spiral steps a meter and a half away. Five birds are half asleep. Suddenly a dog barks loudly and a cat squeals but there is no reaction from the acrobats. A Sardinia warbler in the next door’s tree startles us all in the silence with its four-beat piercing alarm call. No reaction. They have it clear in their heads, there are no predators on the wire.
Clearly, they are the movers and shakers of dawn. They will go when and only when, they are ready.
Half an hour more of pruning feathers. They are slow to wake up like me it seems. It’s quite light at ten to seven but not light enough to trigger the switch on the streetlamps. Suddenly one flies off. I expect them all to follow, but no. It flies in a loop and returns. Has it reconnoitred for all their benefit? Suddenly another flies off. This one doesn’t come back. The lights on the street are off. It’s 7am. The remaining four are shuffling along until they are spread out evenly, a couple of wingspans apart. The runway is ready for departure it seems. In two minutes, they all gone. Nobody returns. I look at my phone. In six minutes it will officially be sunrise. Is that what they were waiting for? Sunrise? Do they always fly just before the sun arrives over the horizon? Don’t tell me they not only have an internal navigation system but a clock and light measuring detector as well!?
That evening as I water the plants, they are back. Tiny eyes watch me. They recognise my steps only a few meters away and they don’t flinch. Amazing to think they will fly south over lands and countryside they have never seen, over people they have never seen. So young, so naïve, so innocent. One of their first points of reference; ‘woman-with-watering-can’, and so by deduction, ‘woman-without-watering-can’.
I read that they eat on the wing and roost at night in reeds until they have to fly over the Saharan desert, the largest hot desert in the world. That’s when they don’t really stop and fly more by night to keep cool. Namibia or South Africa is home number two (or maybe number one, how presumptuous of me to think our home comes first).
They pop to Africa and back every year, foraging on the wing; no food trucks needed, no visas no passports. They make us look… Complicated. They will fly over rivers, hills, bridges, lakes, laughing children splashing in the waves, borders, oceans, customs, tents, maybe over refugee camps and children with no toys, with only drying tears for food. I can’t help but think ‘Fly, little ones, fly and don’t look down. We are not setting a good example of community like you’. I have a flashback from university abseiling down cliffs, concentrating on just the immediate rocks and the position of my feet, ‘Don’t look down’ I told myself.
I know people who say in their next life they would be a bird. I am starting to see why. Don’t they say how we live our lives and who we are, is about half genetic and half environmental?*
So if birds can fly out of trouble they are possibly more able to protect the instincts they were born with. In contrast are we humans drifting away from our ancient instincts? Too urban for our own longevity?
I read, surprise, surprise, that the increasing warming of the earth is changing the food pattern too and migration is being affected. I feel like the mother hen, wishing they would take off, ‘Go, little things go, while there are mosquitos galore! Fly swallows, fly!! Soar up and keep together. I promise not to be sad when you go.’
I am grateful for connecting with the earth through the birds.
I will not only respect their freedom but rejoice in it.
‘Fly far little acrobats. Look after each other, just as you have all summer and don’t give up, and when you get there? Swoop and dive in the skies as only you can and don’t hesitate to be you, be busy and above all, do good.’
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*Power and Pluess, 2015 – personality traits and heritability.
**Architects should support the campaign to support endangered birds by installing swift bricks in all new UK homes. Hannah Bourne-Taylor, June 2025.
*** State of the Planet, August 2024.
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My book is finally about to launch! The magic date I thought was never, ever going to get here is the 30th of August. Please forgive my lack of stories…there has been so much to do and all in the role of ‘Writer’. I have tried to keep up with other writers too but Substack is a very big place these days. I fear I have only dipped my toe in. I have had no time to record this one which is a shame because I love doing that. if I find the time I might add it later.
What I did read, meanwhile elsewhere on Substack this week was:
argues that animals are capable of strategic preplanning and foresight. writing fiction for the first time she wrote about ancient instinct that resonated with me after writing this week’s post on swallows, ‘Beneath the roar of the wind and the crushing thunder, something ancient stirs, and she begins to walk the path she was born to follow’.This week I came across other writers sensing the ending of summer:
in Letters from the Moss writes in The Season you didn’t know you were looking for, ‘I head for the wood. Swallows sit on wires; summer feels as if it is slipping away’. wrote of the rain that broke the heat in two, ‘washing dust to the river and filling the ocean with the sighing of grass’. suffering too, the intense heat and drought on her hill in France, writes, ‘It is said [here]..that after the fifteenth day of this month summer is over, mornings freshen…colour filters back over landscape and all the estival precocity condenses into the mists of autumn goodness….I wait, prune-like, to be rejuvenated. To be plum again.’ also writes about how amazed she is to see birds drinking from a bowl in the garden in the midst of the heat in Yorkshire in June. writes, in ‘Nature and Vulnerability’, ‘Autumn arrives during August,.. nights are drawing in..I look forward to autumn with cosy fires…there is a lot to fit in before then’. ponder in the ‘29th File’, that travel is popular, ‘because maybe it is unfamiliarity that stirs the soul’ which made me wonder if it , the newness of the season, that stirs the soul, for the same reason. ‘I can’t imagine no longer hearing the swifts..feeling stone beneath my feet..missing the perfume of summer’. asks ‘What if the end of summer isn’t an ending at all, but a beginning in disguise?’ in Beewitched talks of ‘the endless end of August’ and says anyway, not to worry, ‘time is circular’ and ‘we all have our own seasons’…interesting I thought. can probably read the clouds he lives so close to the earth. An all round farmer-photographer-family man.And hello to:
, writer, cook and journalist who writes environmental articles for the Guardian but is relatively new to Substack- looking forward to more stories.
Ahh Pipp this is glorious writing, compulsive and beautiful, I shouldn't be sitting here reading, I should be dressing and preparing papaers for meetings - holiday over, back to work, I could cry - but I couldn't stop! Its so good to see a post from you! a thousand thanks for the mention... xx
We have no swallows, no swifts either... six consecutive years they haven't shown up, the land is barren, farmers don't care about swallows and swifts and insects, nor wild boar and badgers for that matter either - only their crops, they don't realise that the insects are necessary too and insects can't live on poison!
Bar the odd stray, the sky is empty of their sleek acrobatics, there are no flashes of sun glancing off their wings and tiny heads. I have shed tears for them, for their absence.
Even House Martens are few this year and I wonder what will be left in ten...?
I am so glad to hear good news re your book - you are amazing! I hope that means you'll be back here writing more often? Lots of love to you, I gotta dash... where the hell did eight weeks holiday go??? xxxx
Hi Pipp, sorry for taking so long getting around to reading this marvellous ode to the swallows. It really is a wonderful piece of writing, you can feel the heat of summer and can’t help but root for those amazing birds. You’ll not be surprised to know we have swallows who nest in our barn each year, we compete to spot the arrival of the first ones each spring, their coming heralding warmer weather. And as we head toward autumn and they gather on the wires that carry electricity to our house, my wife shouts at them, imploring them not to leave. But they always do, on the first north wind of the season which helps them on their way.
Thank you so much for sharing this and also for the mention, it’s such an honour to be included in that list and to be associated with this work.
All the best,
Dave