The view from my office includes a junction box where five telephone wires converge at the top of a pole. For several years, it has been a favourite gathering place for the season’s young swallows and they wreathe this banal technology in the joyous rhythms of their movements and sounds.
The immatures are separable by pale fringes to their wing feathers, but also by the downturned yellow gape-lines at the corners of their mouths, which give them a wonderfully comic clown-like glumness. It is as if all the swirl of these late-August days – the balletic fly-snatching, the sun-blessed leisure, the quiet feather care as they sit amid a pool of the adult swallows’ desultory song – were a source of strange ennui.
Eventually, scores of them have crowded onto this temporary maypole and I can study the minutiae of their collective lives: the way they exercise and stretch full tailed to expose eye spots on each plume; the way they preen or nibble their underwings to discipline stray feathers, or bury their heads, beak-in-back, and snooze for a second or two before resuming the various tasks.
Occasionally, a newcomer lands badly, and then he shuffles and flutters to align his feather weight to the wire. If I draw my focus back a fraction to take them all in, I can see how, at any moment, their individual actions rock the lines and each bird must readjust to the wave-like pulses of movement, flicking tail feathers up and down and collectively riding out the tide swell of air, before they settle back to a sort of stillness.
There is, however, danger in the tranquillity. Several times a day, a sparrowhawk or hobby churns up the birdlife of Claxton and starlings and pigeons and goldfinches also suddenly rise. As the predators cross the village, one can mark their trajectory in a radar of swallow notes, the intensity of calls – swee-swee-swee - sculpting their lines of exit. Then swallows come back to my pole and wires, calm settling over the earlier dread like falling snow, and blue birds clothe bare lines in a renewed vision of old summer.
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