This is the first time for those famous firsts: the first swallow and the first cuckoo. The first swallows to be seen by this pair of eyes came on Sunday April 21st on the Moynalty river, though a friend announced one on the previous Thursday in Navan. No doubt someone will come in with earlier reports.
The Moynalty lot were working over a river in heavy flood. It was raining lightly, muggy sort of weather, and the birds were skimming the surface sort of picking up flies. But the flies were not visible to the naked eye. First there seemed to be two, soon it was possible to count seven. "The vitality of them," said one of the observers on the bank, "compare the strength and ease of those power dives with the fussing and fluttering of the birds, at the feeding devices." And the eye found it hard to follow the bird skimming into a circle which brought it back to the water again and again. Seven of them, it seemed, though it was so hard to follow amid all the gyrations.
If this was their first land fall, the expert said, they may move on in a day or so. And on Monday they certainly weren't on the same stretch. That, of course, was the day after the night of the wind. Anyway, they're well represented. At the meeting of the Boyne and Blackwater on the main road through Navan on Monday the air seemed thick with them. Of course, we all laugh now at old Gilbert White with his theories of hibernation.
Richard Mabey in his book on White writes: "Migration was one of the most vexed questions in eighteenth century science and philosophy, and many thinkers found it impossible - or just over humiliating - to believe that blind instinct could achieve feats of navigation that superior human intelligence was just mastering. No wonder many old superstitions about swallows hibernating, in ponds or caves, were revived as eighteenth century modern myths: dumb sleep was so much less unsettling as an instinctual gift."
And Mabey makes a nice point. It was not just a scientific problem for White. "He was intrigued and delighted by the annual return (or re awakening) of his favourite parish birds, the swallows, swifts and martins; and increasingly their loyalty to the village seemed to echo his own not entirely rational attachment to Selbourne."
Now you, too, be grateful to your own swallows: village or townland or city. Cuckoos an other time.
Gilbert White by Richard Mabey, Century Hutchinson, 1986.