SWALLOWS flock and leave, a sure sign that summer is done, although their happy chatter as they throng on the telephone wire seems inappropriately springlike. As Algernon Swinburne versed it: ‘Swallow, my sister, O sister swallow,/How can thine heart be full of spring?/A thousand summers are over and dead.’
Similarly, the chiffchaff in the garden has renewed its warbling, although not quite with the rich notes of March. The Edwardian ornithologist and Foreign Secretary Sir Edward Grey remarked rightly that the bird’s September trill is ‘a subdued repetition of the song—a sort of quiet farewell before the chiffchaff leaves us
