Wow! Nature is so full of surprises that it can, quite literally, take your breath away which is exactly what happened to me one morning just last week.
I got up soon after dawn and, as is my habit on sunny days, opened both the front and back doors of my little mountain cottage. As there was a fresh breeze blowing, I opened the interior connecting doors too and had just sat down to enjoy a cup of coffee on the doorstep when the most amazing performance began.
A swallow swooped in through the front door, circled around the living room and then zoomed out of the back door, sped through the woodshed, exited into the orchard, turned around and began all over again but this time it was not alone.
The second fly through involved three swallows, the third one five swallows and then they extended their flight path so that they flew through and around all four interconnected rooms of my cottage and suddenly there were 15 of them, maybe more, performing aerial acrobatics around the house and… around my head!
The experience, the awesome performance lasted maybe a full 15 minutes, was stunning and, as they twisted and dived through open doorways the swallows kept up a running conversation with each other — I wish I could have understood what they were saying!
Common swallows, ‘Hirudo rustica’ to give them their correct ornithological title, arrive in the northern mountains in early spring from their wintering grounds in India and Sri Lanka. They lay their eggs in late spring, raise their young and then fly away to warmer climes during autumn when temperatures in the mountains begin to drop and their natural food, flying insects, becomes more difficult to find.
When they are in resident here, they do hang out in small groups and colonies but it is when they are preparing for their winter migration that they are most often noticed as then they gather in flocks of hundreds of birds at a time and are often seen lining up to discuss their flight path along places such as telephone wires or on electricity cables.
The swallows that spend summer in the north of Pakistan are not very shy of humans and, in fact, appear perfectly happy in human company. They often build their mud nests, lined with soft grasses, right inside buildings such as outhouses and, believe it or not, right inside people’s homes if they can get away with it.
The swallows which summer around my home try to construct nests on the mantelpiece above the fireplace in the living room each and every year and, as this is not practical, I cannot leave the doors open from dawn to dusk each and every single day and irrespective of weather, I have to carefully and gently show them out!