As if minted out of the soil that morning, suddenly house martins were around our garden a fortnight ago. Every year the pairs in the village perform an almost ritualised house inspection, when they check properties for suitable nest sites. For a day or two the trench of green space between our houses is threaded with the dazzle of their weighted blue lines. More troubling than this private disappointment is a decline in our village house martins, which reflect how half of all the British population has been lost since 1970. There was one rain-fed moment when a puddle by the village of Psarades, on the edge of Lake Prespa, was a martin magnet.

Source: The Guardian June 06, 2017 04:30 UTC