The Swallows in 2026

This year was perhaps the best year in a decade for the garden’s swallows.

Summer 2024, when much of the filming for the episode of BBC/David Attenborough’s Secret Garden took place, it was consistently wet and cool, terrible for the swallows, who struggled to feed their young. In contrast, 2025 and 2026 have been quite warm and dry, with a few wet phases, good for some types of insects.

Around 10 swallows arrived back here this spring - and then fought for nesting spaces.
Several of the younger birds didn’t find spaces. But the biggest pair of swallows always arrive first and dominate the main shed. Liz and I had taken the old, rotted window lintel out of the annexe end of the main shed which had allowed access for a second nest to be built. A third pair settled into the woodshed.

It’s wonderful seeing the swallows doing aerobatic chases round the yard, or sweeping low above our little meadows and the fields.

This year there were about 25 young in total from the three nests. The woodshed pair even had a final, third brood with just a couple of young, but those fledged at the end of August, so must have been at greatest risk, having had very little chance to feed up before the migration. But perhaps that’s why there were only two in that last brood? So the parents could concentrate on feeding them up?

There’s then that strange time, this year from mid to late August, when the birds seem to loosen their ties with the yard and start leaving its gravitational pull. Large flocks, sometimes mixed with martins, are seen over the fields and above the valley side. Every year I think ‘our swallows’ have gone, only to find most of them still on their usual roosts in the sheds at night. There’s often one day when they all seem to come back and fly around the yard and sheds, as if staking their place and reminding themselves for next year.

By about the 5th September, only some of the young were overnighting at their roosts. By the 10th they had all flown. About 30 in the end. Now the garden is so quiet. Not only without the swallows but the warblers too. Although each year I seem to notice it can become a little noisier through the Autumn, as blackbirds, robins, goldcrests and the like, settle back in to the garden for the winter. Perhaps some of their relatives too, on their winter holiday from further north.