Tales from the country…
A few years ago we started to notice a few different House martins making nests in the gables/eves of some of the houses where we live. They build them with mud and they just stick to the house but unfortunately these sometimes dry out and when they do, they fall down (with the chicks still in!)
We first noticed this a few years ago when one of my cats carried in a birds nest, which we then tried to work out where this had come from and where the birds were. We then found our cat back out, scrabbling around in a bush which happened to be directly under where the house martins had made their nest and when I looked up I saw that the nest had gone. We thought that because our cat was very interested in the bush, that there might be some chicks in there and when we looked we managed to find 3. We scooped them up and put them in a box indoors and searched up what we should do.
The advice is to leave the chicks and the parents will find them. However with two cats ourselves and a lot more in the area we didn’t think this would work and the cats would get to the chicks and also House Martins don’t tend to land on the ground much, choosing to feed on the wing (in flight) and the chicks were very young – So we decided to take them to a wildlife rescue centre, where they could be fed and released safely.
Then we move onto last year, another (or maybe the same ones) pair of House Martins made a nest in the same place and once again we noticed that the nest had fallen but when we went out to check the bush for chicks we noticed a few squashed ones in the road but no live ones. We did go back and check a few times just to make sure.
And then fast forward to this year and once again the house martins made a lovely mud nest in the same place, which when we walked past in the evenings could hear the chicks chirping away, until 2 days ago when Chloe saw that the nest has fallen and what is now becoming an annual thing, she checked the bush below but couldn’t see any chicks. It was only when the girls walked past with the dog last night that they decided to have another look and they found piles of feathers and one chick!
The chick was bought in to the garden and was quite content to sit in Chloe’s hand and snuggle under her arm. The chick did look fully grown and was flapping his wings. We thought the best thing to do would be to keep him in a box with air holes indoors over night and get up early the next day and hope that when the adults are flying around and calling that the chick would call back and fingers crossed would fly off with them – and it worked!! Chloe got up at 5am and took the chick out to where we found him but the adults weren’t coming over this way, so she walked over to another house where we have seen house martins nesting. The chick called out to the others and one flew done low and then the chick flapped its wings and fledged, yay! We were so pleased.
A happy ending.
Amy
