19.High hopes

I have had several reminders this week of the 1959 song ‘High hopes’, performed by Frank Sinatra in the film ‘A hole in the head’. Sammy Cahn’s lyrics tell the story of animals taking on unlikely challenges and they extol the virtues of perseverance and aspiration, but it wasn’t ants or rams that brought on this wave of nostalgia, it was a heron, a tree sparrow and a swallow.
As I drove over the bridge to the house late in the afternoon I made my customary pause to glance left and right along the river. The heron was about 20m away at the edge of the water, clearly about to strike. Within just a few seconds it launched itself forwards and down into the water, immersing not just its head but the whole of the upper half of its body, including both outspread wings. It must have already been aware of the car’s arrival but too committed to its attack to pull out, as it took off immediately afterwards and flew a further 20m along the bank, settling at the top by the edge of the field.
I have seen herons before with a variety of prey, including a dabchick and on one occasion a huge eel that took all of thirty minutes to swallow and continued to writhe energetically even after disappearing down the heron’s throat. But this catch was to present an altogether different challenge – it was a flat fish, probably a flounder, and it was anything but the right shape to make for easy swallowing. I had to imagine the struggle that ensued as it flew off after a few minutes to continue its battle in private, but the heron in the picture took 45 minutes to overcome its challenge.
Later the same day I noticed a worrying sign outside one of the nest boxes occupied by a pair of tree sparrows. There were several inches of what I thought was fishing line protruding from the entrance hole. Fearing this could harm the growing family I decided to remove the offending item, and after a minute or so it came free of the nest. I felt rather stupid when I discovered that far from being fishing line it was actually horse hair. There were two pieces, one black and just under a metre in length and one white and slightly shorter.
Since finding this I have seen many examples on the internet of birds’ nests incorporating horse hair, but I cannot get out of my head the image of a tree sparrow picking up a hair a metre long and flying for what must have been more than a quarter of a mile – and repeating the feat numerous times. High hopes indeed! On the subject of nests, another mystery has just been solved. More for the sake of cleanliness than security we have never left the doors to the out-buildings open for the birds to come in and nest, even though there is evidence that swallows had been allowed to build their mud structures in the stable before we arrived. The mystery we were faced with several weeks ago was why we kept finding swallows flying around inside the stable when we opened the door.
The door was never left open and, apart from a four centimeter gap at the top corner of the door, there were no more access points. Then I saw it. One of the spectacular and noisy aerial displays above the garden culminated with a swallow swooping down to the door and disappearing through what I had so far not even considered a possible way in. Admittedly it did not fly straight through the two inch gap, but it clung to the top of the door for less than a second before passing through. There are now tiny broken speckled egg shells on the floor and two adults passing through the gap dozens of times a day. I suppose we shouldn’t have been surprised – after all, swallows were nesting in caves long before people were building houses and access to a nest through a tiny crack would have provided a much higher chance of survival. What I do now is leave the door slightly ajar from time to time, an experiment to see how wide it needs to be before they will fly straight through without touching the sides. The record at the moment is just fifteen centimeters!