House martins without houses

They say that’s it’s lucky if house martins nest under your eaves. It would certainly be an honour if they came to our house. But what I want to know is – where did they nest before there were houses?

Well, I think that I have found the answer. They nested on cliffs. I was at Flambrough Head – on the east coast in Yorkshire – made famous by Catherine Zeta Jones who waded in and swam in this bay to get to the German submarine, in the last Dad’s Army film.

I sat on a smooth rock and watched as the martins flew over the little cove collecting insects on the wing. I could just make out their nests, high on the chalk cliff face. The sun was beating down and the cliffs were radiant white. Surely the nestlings could not survive this heat. But all was well, because the cliff is laid down with horizontal slabs of chalk and there are overhangs, which create dark shadows under them. This is where the nests have been built.

Martins build their nests in colonies making them from lumps of mud. You would think it would take weeks to build but they come back from Africa and use their old nests, adding pellets of mud if a repair is needed.

The great North Sea was rumbling below, but the martins ignored this as well as the little boats bobbing about in the waves. They flew over our heads and up to their nests. They seemed to do a trial flight first, as if orientating themselves. I could see their shadows rippling over the sand like little aeroplanes on the runway. Then with a ‘chip, chip’ noise they flew under and straight into the nest. On their way out I could see their unmistakable white rump and their forked tail.

It’s only 100 years or so since the martins started to use our houses for nests. But now many houses are being built without eaves and so the house martins may have to go back to the cliffs. Will they be called cliff martins then?

 Vicky will have a stall with her Nature Notes books, based on her columns in the Tizer, at all the Oswestry Nature Festival events at Willow Gallery Oswestry this summer.