The fondest of farewells to our Summer lodgers

Country Living with Francis Farragher

OKAY, it hasn’t been the most joyous of summers for anyone, with confinements, closures and constrictions of all shapes and sizes in place, but as sure as night follows day, most of us living along the country byways enjoyed our usual visitors over the past few months.

If memory serves me right, sometime in mid to late-April they arrived back to the same abode that they have frequented for the last 30 years or so, since one of those house-sheds was constructed close to the back of my dwelling.

It is nearly beyond comprehension that our families of swallows make the journey to and from South Africa each year, managing to suss out the little shed rafter that they, or their parents, located in the previous year.

The scientific name for swallows is Hirundo rustica (I looked that up) while as children back the years, some of the seniors in the villages used to refer to the annual arrival of the Fáinleogs (the Irish word for swallow).

As April passed into May and June and the young ones learned to fly, each entry into the small shed was greeted with an exit by one, two or three young swallows, seemingly just millimetres away from my forehead, but never, ever making contact. Their natural radar sees to that.

The aerial manoeuvres though reach a far more spectacular level through the later months of the Summer when the birds move from being novice flyers to the feathered equivalent of the lithest of dive-bombers in a modern air-force.

Their flight paths are varied with their manoeuvres undertaken at breakneck speed but yet in one of those wondrous moments of nature earlier in the Summer, myself and a friend, saw one of them being ‘picked off’ almost in the blink of an eye.

For more, read this week’s Connacht Tribune.

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