As if minted out of the soil that morning, suddenly house martins were around our garden a fortnight ago. Every year the pairs in the village perform an almost ritualised house inspection, when they check properties for suitable nest sites.



Every time they tantalise me by swooping to examine even our nonexistent eaves. Then they fuss about the gable end to our neighbour’s. Were they ever to choose the last spot, which looks perfect to my unbirdlike eyes, it would bring their distillate of African sunshine to within metres of my office.

For a day or two the trench of green space between our houses is threaded with the dazzle of their weighted blue lines. Down and under, back and away.

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I will them to make that pattern of flight their summer practice and, thus, part of the fabric of my work day. But no. More troubling than this private disappointment is a decline in our village house martins, which reflect how half of all the British population has been lost since 1970.

It was wonderful, therefore, to see them in Greece a week later where the numbers seem undiminished. There was one rain-fed moment when a puddle by the village of Psarades, on the edge of Lake Prespa, was a martin magnet. How strange that this blunt-bodied blue bird, which seems so much a creature of pure air, has this brief intimacy with bare earth.

Time and again 50 martins plumped down on to one tiny patch of wet track. Their feet got so glued to it that the wings were fluttering as if to keep them free, while they bent and stubbed tiny mouths on to the mud.

There were glistening droplets of it all over their backs and breasts, and off they’d fly with untidy hods of building stuff packed on to their beaks. It was an extraordinary blend of earth and singing, lazuline air.

It occurred to me, as they trafficked their annual construction materials, which they must have carried above our heads for more than a million of our shared cave-dwelling years, that maybe martins taught humans how to build houses.

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