A Bad Day

I'm having a bad day today and it's largely to do with what I'm not seeing.

This morning, it being the 15th and almost mid-month, I conducted a last, despairing search for house martins. As noted before in the Diary, hardly any of these intrepid little travellers have arrived in Kilchoan this year, and there are none in Ormsaigbeg. I was told, by people who know far more about birds than I do, that they would be here by mid-July. I can only assume that something terrible has happened to them, that they lie, at this moment, dead in the middle of the Sahara or starved amid the dusty millet fields of southern Africa.

House martins have been in decline since the 1970s. By contrast, both swallows and sand martins are doing well this year. This blizzard of swallows was seen near Craigard, where they were chasing insects around a sycamore tree - almost too fast for a camera to catch.

That their breeding has been so successful is thanks, in part, to thoughtful farmers like Tom Bryson, who allow them access to a shed in which they can nest - even though this particular shed is almost historic.

My other sighting failure relates to a Coastguard search conducted this afternoon. Called out by a concerned member of the public, I failed to spot a solar-powered light - the sort of thing people have lined along their garden paths - lying in a burn beside a rock. That I failed to see it resulted in seven good people spending four valuable hours of their afternoon fighting their way through six foot high bracken, falling into ditches, scratching themselves on lethally barbed brambles, scaling fences, and risking their lives wading through, and jumping back and forth across swollen burns.

It isn't the first fruitless search HM Coastguard Kilchoan have conducted, but what never ceases to amaze me is the cheerful good humour in which these often dangerous missions are carried out; and the generous manner in which they forgive a mistake.