Did you get the rain over the past few weeks too? Sheets of slanting, leaden rain plummeting from a bulging grey sky. The garden was glad for it, but the watery chill certainly didn’t make it feel like August. On one of these wet afternoons, huddled inside with puddle-lakes forming outside the door, I sat peering from the window down to the courtyard below. A line of swallows were shivering on the telephone wire just outside. They were perching, hunched against the weather, one or two of them occasionally dropping down to the shed roof to sit twinkling blue and red beneath the rain.

But it looks like it might get an Indian summer through September! I woke up this morning to a strip of blue sky and a lemon-yellow sun. We’ll have to wait and see if it continues, but for the swallows I certainly hope it does. It’s an important time of year for these birds as, having got their second brood of chicks well fed and independent, both the adults and this season’s young birds will be collecting in groups ready to head off on their epic journey to Africa. 

Imagine that! Chicks still chirping merrily from their cosy nests just a week ago are about to fly for a good six weeks across oceans and vast swathes of desert to reach their wintering grounds. They’ll fly for near to 200 miles a day battling all that Mother Nature has to throw at them. Yet they are tiny. A swallow can weigh less than 19 grams, about the same as a child’s paper aeroplane. Every autumn as I watch them gather together, ready for the off, it amazes me that such delicate creatures can undertake this momentous physical feat.

And that’s why we can glory in nature. The swallows don’t sit in the rain complaining, ‘why me, why does the rain always happen to me. Call this summertime!’ Instead they will just continue being swallows. Provide us with the gift of their fluting song, and the iridescence of their shining blue backs even as the rain pours down. They don’t think of themselves as brave or bold, congratulate themselves on distance travelled or berate themselves for not making it, but will just do what they do. And make the world a brighter and more incredible place as a result of their being.

Image courtesy of Kevin Simonds wildlife imagery.