While I was up on the moor I was startled
by a rushing of wings as a flock of lapwings passed over a low hill, flying fast,. and by that wonderful undulation of black and white that only the peewits Can show. The flocking of birds has a sad significance. One notices the twittering of more swallows than usual one day, and the next the telegraph wires are lined with them, finches move in company and the grass is no longer green but fawn and scorched and old, barely surviving the sun that has beaten on southern slopes. Each Year I have hardly realised that the screaming of swifts has ceased when I awake to the gathering of young swallows. In the weeks ahead, as the warmth of the sun declines, the movement of other birds will compensate for the departure of the swifts and the swallows. Fieldfares will return in late October and those whirring crowds of starlings will come, as well as mallard and teal and other wandering waterbirds that drop down at the end of a flight that began in the Tundra or far away in a swamp on the other side of the world.
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