SwallowThe last few Barn Swallows, bound for breeding areas in the farthest reaches of the Northern Hemisphere are, in these last few days of April, passing Mount Meru. This is three degrees South of the Equator. Most mornings we see them flickering overhead in ones and twos, occasionally in groups of up to six or seven. It looks like they are heading straight for the base of the misty blue volcano, whose amazing exploded cone surges fully three thousand metres upwards, above the gentle undulations of East Africa's plateau, here at an average elevation of 1300 metres.
Where is each swallow, most endearing of all commensal birds, really heading? One can’t help but wonder whether, in each tiny beating heart and mind, there is any incling of what fate might have in store, on such globe-spanning flights, any one of which makes a mockery of our comfortable modern journeys?
My human family comes from northwest of Britain (between 52 and 56 degrees North) where traditionally most male swallows appear first, quite suddenly, during the last few days of April, at their favoured cattle barns and around other country buildings. It seems odd that these last few northbound 'Tanzanian' migrant swallows, crossing the northern plains, and averaging 300 to 400 kilometres per day, are also male birds sporting those fabulously long, pin sharp, outer tail streamers. Some of them, as they pass over my funnel-shaped one acre ´Helgoland trap´ of a garden, which also points straight to the heart of the great mountain, delight us with a brief sprinkling of spring swallow’s song. Try as I might not to, I cannot help feeling that these birds are somehow singing in recognition, an appreciation almost, of the strange actions one Eurasian man is doing here, assisting if only temporarily, a little fallow garden to 'degenerate', through bush, into a miniature modern forest.
The Garden Allowing swallow-nourishing populations of myriad little fly and beetle species to rise-up and multiply, to proliferate, wild plants having bounced-back, regenerated. For we are bucking the materialist trend, the imitative consumerism that is creeping even into Africa, by allowing the land to rise-up, out of its recent, food-only-for-humans, over-simplified condition and, via “neophyte bush land” to become something “natural”. Although nearly all field weeds hereabouts are indigenous, or long-established foreign africans, most of the taller trees and shrubs, certainly in Arusha remain slightly too alien for the taste of Africa’s native bug life, being quite recently arrived from Australasia or Latin America.
And, as if on Helgoland or Fair Isle, the garden is a “migrant trap” no less, because this one acre is increasingly surrounded by either hedge-less expanding fields or Afro-suburbia, as small holding plots (of maize and beans) disappear, sold-off and made-over into commuter dwellings which, in the train of economic freedom, are mushrooming at every corner. And at night time the security lights of our two chicken farming neighbours, one on either side, illuminate both their white-washed walls and the resurgent hedges of the wilding garden; and in so doing beckon passing migrant birds, to drop out of the mountain mists and drizzle.
It’s strange. There seem to have been so few Barn Swallows around here during the last boreal winter. In fact nearly all Palearctic migrant passerines have been in very short supply. Most species arrived very late, some never showed at all, and those that did, not until early January; most left early, many just about the end of February.
Although we receive passage swallows from breeding areas in Western Europe, the majority of the birds we see, especially those northbound in spring are heading for land from the Black Sea eastwards, and some are going as far as Kazakhstan and Mongolia. Nevertheless one never hears nowadays in East Africa of acacia branches breaking under the combined weight of assembling swallows as used to happen here as recently as during the Second World War! (see e.g. C.W. Mackworth Praed's and Grant, C.H.B. 1955). In truth it is doubtful that we have seen that many swallows (enough to break the bough) all 'winter' through. Are they already declining across the wooded steppe of Central Asia as they have in Western Europe? I remember around little family farms on the beautiful island of St. Agnes, in the Isles of Scilly, dozens of nesting swallows in 1970. By my next spring visit a decade later that number had already dwindled by more than half and one wonders how many nests will shelter young swallows this coming summer.
Tanzania for Christmas? 2004/2005 and 2005/2006 bring bone dry boreal solstices. 2006/2007 by contrast drenching, was superbly wet. It rained in Arusha virtually every day for months, throwing the northern circuit safari industry into near chaos, as nature reasserted her absolute power over the soils of Serengeti’s endless plain.
Strangely too, throughout northern Tanzania, we have seen many fewer Barn Swallows during this “wetter winter”. So naturally we hope they were simply more dispersed, feeding out there somewhere, across 'unvisited' sub-Saharan lands. Certainly, at this latitude at least, there were many more verdant areas in which to feed than there had been in the two years previous.
However disturbingly, things are getting stranger in these late days. Mankind, uncaring or oblivious, clearly has made his greatest mark. Climate zones are on the move again. Belatedly even unobservant people recognize that we are living in arguably the most interesting of times. With ambivalent feelings I recall my first male swallow of a few 'springs' back. He was in tip-top and tailed, shining-blue condition, simply bursting for the spring (of 2004), dancing north and almost singing, even when crossing the industrialized winter wheat lands of La Janda, just north of the Strait of Gibraltar. Yet the date was 17 November 2003! Typically Barn Swallows return to breed in this part of southern Spain from mid-January.
