They say that one swallow does not make a spring but it certainly looked that way on Monday afternoon.
A lone welcome swallow had arrived at the Waterworks Reserve as the temperature hit a warm and sunny 21 degrees.
My records usually show the swallows arriving around the first weekend of September but I had a shock last year when they were late to show up.
It’s always a worry when migratory birds appear late, and in smaller number, because it raises the possibility of a decrease in population.
The alarm bells might have been ringing last year but I was soon celebrating with relatively large flocks of swallows being spotted eventually. I shouldn’t say “celebrating” because they actually arrived on September 11, an auspicious day for other reasons because, of course, it marks the anniversary of the infamous 9/11 terrorism attack in New York.
It’s always a joy to see the swallows, though, and this year as in most years they followed the first of the migrants, the fan-tailed cuckoo, which I heard in the first week of August, and the striated pardalotes a few days later.
The pardalotes by Monday afternoon were already singing their territorial song, which sounds like someone saying “pick-it-up”, to declare nesting sites. The pardalotes nest in cavities and they have found that the cracks in the sandstone walls of the Waterworks’ historic infrastructure make ideal nesting sites.
Each spring birders eagerly await the migrants, and at the same time ponder their remarkable, arduous journeys. With late snowfalls on the mainland, plus torrential rain and floods, it was expected our summer visitors would be late but they look to be arriving on time.
It remains a mystery where most of the migrants spend the Tasmanian winter. It’s certain that our silvereyes – because the Tasmanian sub-species has distinctive russet feathers on its flanks – winters on the Gold Coast of southern Queensland and are easily identified. We can only a hazard a guess as to where the others go.
Each year a sample of migratory birds are fitted with leg rings in the hope they might reveal their wintering grounds but, because so few are recovered, scientists have an incomplete picture of their movements.
As for our swallows, it was once believed they headed north-east after crossing Bass Strait to settle in New South Wales and south-east Queensland. Another possibility is they fly west, and then turn north at the Grampians to travel the Great Dividing Range to reach NSW and Queensland.
A second member of the swallow family, the tree martin, also travels from the mainland, arriving slightly later than the welcome swallows. Again, the date of September 11 has significance; it’s when I first see them flying above the tree tops, claiming a higher elevation that does not put them in competition with the welcome swallows, which fly closer to the ground.