If you came to this Derbyshire spot in winter, with all its down-at-heel problems of congested traffic, air pollution, dense housing and largely garden-free conditions, the bottom of Fairfield Road would be about the last place in Buxton you’d imagine to find breeding house martins. Yet it is about the only place in town with a good-sized colony of these exquisite if declining summer migrants, so unpicking why they have persisted here and gone almost everywhere else locally is instructive.
One element may be the height of the terrace housing. The buildings are on three floors and the overhanging eaves, where martins locate their mud-cup nests, are beyond the reach of “tidy-minded” souls worried about droppings below. A more certain factor is that the back of Fairfield is only a house martin’s swoop away from what was once the town tip called Hogshaw. Yet in the last half-century it has been redeemed by nature and smothered in sallow and birch woodland. Those two are among our most insect-friendly tree species, and the resulting abundance of invertebrates which not only accounts for the birds’ presence here, but determines almost everything about house martins.
They may weigh just 19g and, when perched on the nest lip, remind you of tiny pied mice, but they are global wanderers, travelling from sub-Saharan latitudes to profit from the northern hemisphere’s peak insect abundance in April-September. Come autumn, they return south to some largely unknown portion of Africa. Those journeys really put into context those projects for helping martins, or swifts, which address only their nesting places or which work by erecting artificial nests. In a sense, you can’t give martins a home, as some conservation groups advertise in their strapline: because their home is the whole world. If you’re going to help house martins, then think mainly about the insects of which the birds are made.
That’s why Hogshaw, the old tip, needs to become Buxton’s newest nature reserve, a place outside human design, a zone set aside for its semi-wild character and for its wildlife, which local people can cherish. Achieving that goal would give Buxton’s house martins real hope of a genuine home.
• Under the Changing Skies: The Best of the Guardian’s Country Diary, 2018-2024 is published by Guardian Faber; order at guardianbookshop.com and get a 15% discount
