On the Wildside: Summertime swallows gathering

However, when you find a good place for their food, you realise how it would be if the environment were in a rather better state. I came across just such a place near Whitby Abbey above the high cliffs of the North Sea coastline, the sky full of feeding swallows skimming over meadows and hedgerows, and around the small mere in the Abbey grounds. Here, with plentiful insects, swallows busily fed themselves and their recently fledged youngsters. Birds were coming to rest on telephone wires and on walls as juvenile birds waited in turn to be fed, their yellow ‘gapes’ around the beak marking them as babies. As parent birds arrived, they were met by a cacophony of increasingly demanding calls from their offspring. I couldn’t work out whether the adults fed the most noisy babies first or the most, or whether they fed each in turn. For the babies is patience a virtue I wonder, or does food come to those that call the loudest?

The whole spectacle brought me round to thinking about how the countryside could be, and indeed should be, and I wondered whether a new government with an agenda apparently, to ‘build, build, build’, will spare a thought at all for nature and wildlife. We share the planet with a myriad of other species and these and their wellbeing are intimately connected to our own survival. Whilst gazing on the annual natural spectacle of the swallows and their young gathering to feed, I couldn’t but help question whether rhetoric about climate and biodiversity crises, is largely just hot air or are we really acting for nature. Indeed, to take it further, there is plenty of environment-speak that means little for wildlife or nature in the round, but which sees the planet simply as ours to take, use, and abuse. I then just gazed at the swallows.

Professor Ian D. Rotherham, researcher, writer & broadcaster on wildlife & environmental issues, is contactable on [email protected]; follow Ian’s blog (https://ianswalkonthewildside.wordpress.com/) and Twitter @IanThewildside