When we moved from London to Eynsham, six years ago, one of the most welcome – and welcoming – sights during our first spring and summer was the swallows swooping in and out of open-sided barns. Since then, I have had the impression that their numbers have gradually dwindled, locally, to single figures. But this year, there may be as many as twenty of them again.
The few that made it from Africa to just north of the A40, have clearly had a successful breeding season. This is unexpected, given the dry spring and heatwaves of summer. In previous years, when unusually hot weather has struck, the clutches have sometimes died one by one or en masse, from heat or thirst maybe, and whole nests have fallen out of the rafters with their dead young inside. This year we have seen just two dead chicks.
Why should this be? One can only guess, but it seems the heatwaves arrived at the right time, when the chicks were old enough to survive them. And what has been happening nearby has probably helped the swallows and other wildlife. No doubt the establishment of Eynsham’s Nature Recovery Network is beginning to pay off around the village, south of the A40.
Here to the north, O’Malley’s field next to his aggregate recycling site has been left to its own devices, so far uncut, and is awash with various grasses, ‘weeds’ and wildflowers. A botanist enthusiast I know is particularly envious of this field’s field scabious. The footpath alongside the site is frequented by wrens and chiffchaffs.
The field next to O’Malley’s, between City Farm and Lower Road, is one of the fields on which the botanist has been working with the landowner. It has been ploughed and sown with wild arable plants and, despite the hot and dry weather, has come to life in a variety of colours: red poppies, yellow corn marigolds, purple knapweed, white campion and many more that I can’t identify. These are the more obvious plants. Those that are more modest and unobtrusive often have fancier names, such as sun spurge and fat hen.
People used to eat the leaves of fat hen until spinach came on the scene. Apparently its seeds are a potential alternative to quinoa, if you can be bothered to harvest them: a plant that is at once old-fashioned and trendy.
We have watched the swallows skimming these fields for the insects that the wildflowers have attracted. And where there are more insects, there are more birds, mammals and predators . . . and in particular, it seems, more swallows.