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Updated: June 20, 2025
Strong sunshine glared upon the oversaling tiles, and white buckled walls, and cracky lintels; but nothing showed life, except an old yellow cat, and a pair of house-martins, who had scarcely time to breathe, such a number of little heads flipped out with a white flap under the beak of each, demanding momentous victualling.
This same naturalist ordered the sparrows, which deprived the house-martins of their nests, to be shot; but the one which was left, "be it cock or hen, presently procured a mate, and so for several times following." I could add analogous cases relating to the chaffinch, nightingale, and redstart. Mr.
On the left side is the wood-wren, with a nest just like a handful of hay flung down among some dead leaves. Near here, too, are the house-martins, and further on the swallows and other birds, who build under the projecting eaves of houses; of all the nests, these look the most safe and cosy.
Up the current where it issues from the fields and falls over a slight obstacle the sunlight plays and glances. A great hawthorn bush grows on the bank; in spring, white with May; in autumn, red with haws or peggles. To the shallow shore of the brook, where it washes the flints and moistens the dust, the house-martins come for mortar.
In the second week of September there is usually an immense migration of house-martins and swallows down the river. I have already described what I once saw on a migration night on Chiswick Eyot. Sometimes they go on past London, and find themselves near Thames mouth with no osier beds or shelter of any kind. Then they settle on ships.
On any genial and windless day of sunshine in winter a few swallows would reappear, nobody could guess from where, to spend the bright hours wheeling like house-martins about the house, revisiting their old breeding-holes under the eaves, and uttering their lively little rippling songs, as of water running in a pebbly stream.
Some fate, I fear, overtook both starlings and house-martins. Another time it was the season of the lapwings. Towards the end of November , there appeared a large flock of peewits, or green plovers, which flock passed most of the day in a broad, level ploughed field of great extent.
It has been a disappointment this year not to listen to their eager whistling and the flutter of their wings as they vibrate them rapidly while hovering a moment before entering their cavern. A pair of house-martins, too, built under the eaves close to the starlings' nest, and they also disappointed me by not returning this season, though the nest was not touched.
Nevertheless, the migratory instinct is so powerful, that late in the autumn swallows, house-martins, and swifts frequently desert their tender young, leaving them to perish miserably in their nests. This fact, the Rev. Transact. 1824, and has since been confirmed by several observers, especially by Mr. Blackwall.
These belated birds looked as if they wished to hibernate, or find the most cosy holes to die in, rather than to emigrate. On the following day at noon they came out again and flew up and down in the same feeble aimless manner. Undoubtedly a few swallows of all three species, but mostly house-martins, do "lie up" in England every winter, but probably very few survive to the following spring.
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