They're all long gone now (from this eastern part of the country anyway), the young swallows and other hirundines. A writer in an English magazine asks why, just towards the end of September, the young swallows were playing chase in a regular circuit one day, first flying across the garden and through one of the arches into the big barn, up to the nest they had just vacated as if to touch it for luck, then swooping out again, going round the garden and then back, round and round and round, before settling in a long line on one of the beams for no more than five seconds? Then they flew off on the circuit again. It went on for about half an hour. Why?
This was Susan Hill, writing in Country Life of September 28th. She had other questions, one of which was this. When two owls hoot across to one another from trees 50 yards apart, calling and answering, calling and answering, what are they saying? Is the conversation about love, about mice, or about territorial war? Who knows the answers, and if they do, how do they, she asks?
A fortnight later in the same magazine, dated October 12th, a correspondent named Burke from Devon replies that Susan Hill's query about swallows could just as well be asked about house martins who do the same thing each year. For some days, he writes, streams of them swoop up repeatedly to the nest sites, veering away at the last second and fly repeatedly through the feeding areas. Sometimes they perch all over the roof as part of the same behaviour, as many as 60 at a time, chattering. This all happens, he writes, before the familiar departure committee on the power lines.
He believes the birds are imprinting the image of their summer home into the visual memory of the young, who fly in the same flocks. This year's young will be back to the same place next spring; not merely to the same house on the same wall but to the same brick.
That may be that. What about the owls? Years ago, in the trees around the Park Hotel in Virginia, there was a time of year when owls hooted for hours on end. They must have scared the mice they hoped to catch. Maybe owls don't care; perhaps they were warning other owls off their territory. Birds and our misconceptions, as well as our knowledge, about them do brighten life for us, don't they? Y