For myself, I will admit, I just love the house-martins. They may be given to eating flies; but what of that? The skylark himself—Shelley’s skylark, Meredith’s skylark—affects a diet of worms, and nobody thinks one penny the worse of him. Even Juliet, I don’t doubt, ate lamb chops like the rest of us. Indeed, it happened to me a few mornings since, during some very hot weather, to be positively grateful for these insectivorous tastes on the part of our feathered fellow-citizens. We were sitting on the verandah, much tried by a plague of flies; it was clear that “the blood of an Englishman” attracted whole swarms of midges and other unwelcome visitors. As soon as the house-martins became aware of this fact, they drew nearer and nearer to us in their long curves of flight, swooping down upon the insects attracted by our presence before they had time to arrive at the verandah. We sat quite still, taking no notice of the friendly birds’ manœuvres; till after a while they mustered up courage to come close to our faces, flying so low and approaching us so boldly, that we might almost have put out our hands and caught them. I am aware, of course, that the martins merely regarded us from the selfish point of view, as fine bait for midges; while we in return were glad to accept their services as vicarious flycatchers. But on what else are most human societies founded save such mutual advantage? And do we not often feel real friendship for those who serve us for hire well and faithfully? In the midst of so much general distrust of man, I accept with gratitude the confidence of the house-martins.
All members of the British swallow-kind are amply represented in and about our three acres. The common swallows breed under the thatched eaves of the ruined shed in the Frying Pan, and hawk all day over the shallow trout-stream that bickers down its middle. You can tell them on the wing by their very forked tail. It is, I think, in part a distinguishing mark by which they recognize their own kind, and discriminate it from the martins; for the outer-tail feathers are particularly long and noticeable in the male birds, whence I take them to be of the nature of attractive ornaments. At the beginning of the breeding season, too, the males assume a beautiful pinky blush on the lighter parts of the plumage, which may specially be observed as they turn flashing for a moment in bright April sunshine. The sand-martins, again, the engineers of their race, have excavated their long tunnelled nests in the crumbling yellow cliff that flanks the cutting on the high road opposite; I love to see them fly in with unerring aim at the narrow mouth as they return all agog from their aërial hunting expeditions on cool summer evenings. They are the smallest and dingiest of our swallows; they have no sheeny blue-black plumage like their handsome cousins, but are pale brown above, and dirty white below. The house-martin, last of all, can be recognized at once upon the wing by his conspicuous belt of pure white plumage, almost dazzling in its brilliancy, which stretches in a band across the lower half of his back; as he pirouettes on the wing, this badge of his kind gleams for a moment against the sky, and then fades as if by magic. His shorter tail scarcely shows forked at a distance, but when you watch him at close quarters, it is delightful to observe how he broadens or narrows it as he flies, to steady and steer himself. In order fully to appreciate this point, however, you must have the quick keen eye of the born observer. As for the pure black swifts—those canonical birds that haunt the village steeple—they are not swallows at all, but dark and long-winged northern representatives of the humming-birds and trogons. All these alike are summer migrants in England, for they can but come to us when insects on the wing are cheap and plentiful.