Another Life: It took well over a decade for swallows to find the ledges at the back of our open woodshed: perhaps they were waiting for roses round the door.
This year they've settled in, flashing back and forth under a great swag of pink blossom to feed a second brood. And that's after a gala day when the whole first family put on a flying display between the kitchen window and the road: figures-of-eight around the oaks, interweaving swoops over, under and through the five-barred gate, Red-Peril dives to skim the ground by inches (centimetres, if you must).
This tutelary session held us spellbound, making up for all the years we coveted the birds whizzing under barn doors on our neighbour's farm down the road.
The fact that barn swallow, Hirundo rustica, has come to be their proper name shows how far they've changed their ways in the long course of evolution. Like all the world's swallows and martins - 74 species at current classification - they are designed to hunt insects on the wing, and originally nested in disused holes, mostly on sea coasts or in caves. Their deeply-notched tails give them manoeuvrability to snap at small, fast-flying insects, and the same strong jaw muscles let them start scooping up pellets of mud.
Learning to mould their own nests gave them wider choices, and adapting to human structures let them expand their range even more. Some martins and swallows still use natural sites, and others are still experimenting with man-made equivalents of cliffs, crags and caves.
The European house martin went furthest, penetrating even the heart of cities. But the barn swallow, now almost a global species, has stuck to the buildings of farmland, seeking out ledges in cave-like spaces with close protection overhead.
The birds need, of course, to get in and out at will. A friend was truly dismayed this summer when changes to an outbuilding seemed to have ended a companionable relay of swallows stretching back at least half a century. Such feelings may be frequent, if unconfessed, in a countryside busily demolishing its stone sheds for new bungalow foundations and driveways.
Out on Inishbofin, the island on my horizon, swallows are nesting in many old farm sheds with openings high in the gables, the better to slide in long, beachcombed planks to dry out on the rafters. Such planks, once so useful to the islanders, are rare in the age of container cargo, but the detail is recorded in Tim Gordon's excellent new book, The Birds of Inishbofin, Connemara. Inishbofin has long had attention from ornithologists, but Gordon is the first to serve the increasing number of visitors who pack a pair of binoculars in the hope of seeing something special at this most westerly inhabited outpost of Connacht. Increasingly, that is coming to mean once ordinary birds of "unimproved" Irish farmland before the era of intensification and baled silage. Inishbofin was Galway's last stronghold of the corn bunting, with a final record in 1989; the yellowhammer, too, has disappeared from most of the west. But skylarks, for example, sing above some 60 territories from end to end of the island and can be heard together with the cuckoo and the corncrake on a single summer's day.
Tim Gordon is BirdWatch Ireland's corncrake marshal in the west, and the six or seven calling birds he has mapped at night on Inishbofin in recent weeks confirm their slow restoration on the island since the shocking drop to zero in 1994. Corncrakes and 'Bofin's summer have belonged together both for the islanders and generations of its visitors.
I have my own memories of balmy nights when the walk back from the pub to East End village, past Granny's Lake, would be attended by the ventriloquy of two or three rasping birds, bouncing their calls off the rock-face called - as Gordon's book now reminds me - Faul Traonach, corncrake cliff.
East End was also the scene of a strange episode in November, 1999, when islanders Gustin and Clodagh Coyne found themselves caring for a late-migrating corncrake found mauled by a cat in a nearby garden. Before it finally succumbed, it became tamer by the day, running after the tin can Gustin tapped at feeding time.
The Birds of Inishbofin shows real feeling for the island as a human, as well as wildlife, community. Contributions from islanders enrich the book. Its rarest bird photograph is of a waxwing perched on barbed wire with a winter wind blowing through its crest - surely Europe's most westerly waxwing ever pictured.
It was captured by Caimin Coyne with a digital camera from the family's battered Land Rover.
