The swift, on the other hand (no relation), has even less of a margin for hard times. Constantly airborne and even sleeping on the wing, it feeds almost exclusively on flying insects, and on spiders airborne on gossamer threads. It raises only one brood in the year, nesting mostly in the roofs of cities where the air is warmer and flying insects are in greater supply, writes Michael Viney
(There's an excellent website devoted to the swift at www.swift.utigges.il.eu.org)
'When you wet the bed," wrote Joyce, "first it is warm, then it gets cold." Rain in July can be very like that: at once more sensual and more discommoding. You let the fat drops slide down the back of your neck and then wish you hadn't.
It takes a special artist to paint this sort of weather. There's one from Philadelphia, Stuart Shils, whose work I much admire. He spends time in north Mayo, doing small, rapid, intense pastels in front of nature (sometimes, indeed, through a windscreen streaked with rain). His concentration is fierce - "like swordfighting or tennis", he says - and the result is often bravely blurry but exactly true: you enter the paintings to breathe the chill of mist, or peer through rain to confirm the half-seen hedge, a hill's dark shoulder, a wave-flecked sea.
To live happily in the west, it helps to open the senses in this direct, non-judgmental kind of way: to become as receptive to the drift of light and moisture as to brilliant interludes of sun. But then I am not a small farmer, watching his one cut of soggy, mud-streaked silage being wrapped in plastic in a late and desperate harvest.
At the end of the summer of 1985, I noted a story that arrived at Thallabawn from elsewhere in the county: "He turned his hay for the 27th time, went indoors and hung himself." That kind of despair belonged to the time when farmers saved their own hay, cut their own turf, grew their own potatoes - a world of self-sufficiency that a really bad summer could darken into misery. Now, the web of REPS and other subsidies, and money from off-farm jobs, seems to have blunted any personal embitterment with God.
In 1985 it was the steady downpours of July and August that so demoralised. This year, my morning trip to the rain gauge in the lawn has kept me in my wellies since spring. In May and June, there were 280 millimetres (11 inches) of rain and just two days when it didn't rain at all. As I write, the first 10 days of July have added another 40 millimetres.
This hasn't been good for the birds. Sorting unseasonable logs for the stove in our open woodshed the other day, I was visited by a swallow, swooping in to perch a couple of feet above my head for a brief rest and a twitter somewhere out of the rain. It reminded me how few swallows I have seen this year and how vulnerable they must be to a year when insect flight is beaten down to the ground. Reports from other parts of the island suggest that widespread failure of the first broods of swallows may already have occurred.
Barn swallows are swift fliers, with plenty of banking and turning when catching food for their nestlings. This burns up a lot of energy - the more so when flying insects are scarce. By the time the chicks are two-and-a-half weeks old, both parents should be bringing food to them every minute or two - mostly flies, beetles and midges, topped up, as the chicks grow larger, with damselflies and moths.
Swallows will certainly improvise in hunting, snatching up floating insects from water and caterpillars from leaves. They will hover at walls and windows, pecking up insects and spiders. If there was, in fact, a failure of first broods, the second clutches might do better, now that ground insects are more abundant and accessible.
Dublin once had even more swifts than Paris, swooping through streets filled with horse traffic to feast on dung-flies. In the 1850s, John Watters noted how, on one sultry July evening, "some swifts rushed past a horse's head in the neighbourhood of Westmoreland Street, screaming so loudly that the horse became excited and endeavoured to dismount his rider and at last took fright and galloped up Sackville Street".
Watters also owned a stuffed swift, which died "by striking itself violently against a gentleman's hat in Suffolk Street, falling stunned and senseless at his side". Today, the map of the swift's distribution in Ireland still shows great blank patches in the windy west and the densest concentrations in the urban east and Leinster's fly-generating areas of intensive cattle farming and horse-breeding studs.
Swifts are the last migrants to arrive (in mid-May) and the first to leave, but poor weather slows everything down in their breeding season - date of laying, length of incubation, the chicks' time in the nest. If things get too bad, the parent birds stop flying and remain in the nest, where both they and their unfed nestlings sink into a temporary torpor, breathing slowly, their metabolism just ticking over, like hibernating hedgehogs. The non-breeding birds, meanwhile, may suddenly leave town for a while, taking long trips away from the worst of the depression.
In a good year, the young are fledged in as little as five weeks, taking wing to forage for themselves. Many leave Ireland at once, towards the end of July, and the adults follow within days. In a summer like this one, however, the whole cycle may take a few weeks longer. Around the first week in August, given the right warmth and humidity, the ants of Dublin take to the air in great swarms for the nuptial flights of their colonies.
High over the city, the swifts share the feast with black-headed gulls: a last, substantial, Irish meal before heading off for Tanzania, Zaire and Zimbabwe.
I have noticed that birds are ravenous at my bird table, as due to the rain there are no insects. Should we feed them as we do in wintertime?
Anna Glynn, Galway
I think that would be a good idea.
There is a brown magpie in Marino. I first saw him on June 16th in my garden, and have seen him several times since then.
Margaret Doyle, Marino, Dublin 3
Magpies with abnormally coloured plumage are regularly recorded. They can be white (albino), and grey or fawn. But the most common aberration is when the parts that are usually black are grey or brown.
On June 30th I believe I saw a pair of white-winged black tern standing on the Dublin Port South Wall.
Eric Beasley, Dublin 6
There have been sightings of vagrant white-winged black terns almost every year on the east coast in spring and autumn during their migration to and from their wintering grounds in Africa. They breed in eastern Europe and north of the Caspian Sea in freshwater marshes. In summer, the adult has a black head and chest, a greyish black back, white wing coverts and white tail. In winter, it is a grey and white bird with a black ear spot.
Edited by Michael Viney.
Send observations to Thallabawn, Carrowniskey PO, Westport, Co Mayo. e-mail: viney@anu.ie (include postal address).