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Subject: Swallow summer Author: Eleanor Watkins [ Next Thread | Previous Thread | Next Message | Previous Message ] Date Posted: Sunday 23 August, 2009 12:27:40 Hi Horatio, It was so nice meeting you at the Hay Festival in May, it quite made my week! Since reading 'A Single Swallow', both of us have viewed our own nesting swallows with new eyes this summer. We watched the nest building, the sitting, hatching and feeding the growing youngsters and then had the great privelege of seeing the fledglings make their first tentative flutterings from the nest. The parents lined them up, first on a steel girder near the nest and then on a phone cable right outside my bedroom window. I stood inside the window on a level with them for ages, and began to feel what they were feeling, uncertainty about the big world, a bit unsteady on their perches, startled at movements of other birds and squirrels in the bushes, terror when a buzzard circled overhead or the cat prowled below. The parents worked so hard to keep them safe, dive-bombing the cat (and me too a few times), and more than once I saw a mob of swallows seeing off a buzzard! Once the youngsters were fending for themselves the parents set to and raised another family! Today we saw maybe forty swallows circling and swooping around the barns and then sitting in rows on the wires - maybe planning their long journey to warmer climes. We'll miss them. Thank you for helping us to enjoy and appreciate these beautiful birds. I hope you're well. Are you working on another book? I have one due out tomorrow. Please feel free to stop by for a cup of tea any time you're in the area. Best wishes, Eleanor [ Next Thread | Previous Thread | Next Message | Previous Message ]