A Bird of two Seasons
As I emerged from Durban’s airport, into searing heat, I realised I had made the very same journey as the birds.
It’s January 2020, and the swallows are home. They arrived a while ago – at first in ones and twos, then in small flocks, and finally in their hundreds of thousands, bringing joy to people across the land. Don’t worry – I haven’t got my seasons muddled up. I’m not talking about the annual return of swallows to Britain (and the rest of the northern hemisphere) in March and April, but their arrival in September and October to a place 10,000km away: South Africa. We may think of swallows ‘flying south for winter’, but the truth is that they actually enjoy a second spring and summer, half a world away, in their ancestral home.
In it for the long haul
Swallows are a truly global species – breeding right across the northern hemisphere from Alaska to Japan, and wintering in South America, Africa, Asia and Australia. This year, for the first time in more
