During these hot summer months there sometimes seems to be very little new going on - and then something changes your perception of what’s going on around you and you see that Nature’s always changing, always on the move and there’s very little that’s static about it.
I came in this evening from taking my daughter Alexandra water-skiing on the lake and was walking off the pontoon when one of those moments woke me out of a normal day and brought home to me once again how lucky I am to be able to live here.
Of course I realise I’m lucky every day - I mean it’s not everyone who has the good fortune to live in such a wonderful place and wake up every morning to the view we have here - but this was something extra special.
I looked up and noticed, (of all the trivial things to set one’s heart racing), a House Martin …. and then another …. and then another, and another and another.
I’ll tell you why a House Martin’s special for me later, but as I was looking at them swooping low over the garden all around me, I noticed too an ordinary Barn Swallow, and then a Red-rumped Swallow and then a Common swift and then a pair of Alpine Swifts - all of them hawking in the early evening in MY garden! What a sight!
But, as I said, funnily enough the thing that really got me going was the House Martins! OK, so a House Martin’s not so special, why the interest? Why not double the excitement over something much more special like the Red-rumped Swallows or the Alpine Swifts? After all they’re both a good deal rarer than the House Martins, so why all the fuss?
Well, it goes back a long way - a very long way!
When I started to build this Quinta and its gardens, I purposefully built it as much as possible with the Birds and Wildlife in mind; I wanted the place to blend in with the countryside, to be an asset to it and not an eyesore, and I judge my success by the species I have dropping in and using it. Now it might surprise you that during the last 23 years I have NEVER seen a House Martin here. They’re common nearby, they nest in their hundreds in Santa Clara only four kms away as the - well - House Martin flies, but they’re communal nesters and very site specific, raraely changing their sites, rarely changing their preferred hunting grounds, and I’ve never seen them here, so to see a bunch of them flitting in and out between the trees was, for me, a thrilling sight and one that I’ll treasure for a long time.
Something so simple; something so profound. You never know, this time next year we might have them nesting here; now that WOULD be a success!