My name is Joel Ashton and I’ve been designing and installing gardens and habitats for wildlife for almost 20 years. My career has been a natural transition into habitat creation since having a passion for wildlife from a young age. After having helped a colony of house martins go from one to 14 breeding pairs...

Where do House Martins go for winter? Summary This trawl through the literature reveals that ringing returns are few and far between, that experiments with physical geo-locators ten years ago was abandoned, and that the most reliable evidence comes from analysing feathers for their isotopes that now roughly pin-point areas in sub-Saharan Africa where they...

Declining passage of House Martins The passage of House Martins (HM) seems to have tailed off dramatically in this part of the Cévennes mountains (St Martial, 30440, Gard). This is not too far from the Department of Herault (34) which borders the Mediterranean. In previous years exhausted HMs arrived between 14-26 August, but none at...

2022/23 (Phase 1) Summary by Sue and Tony Farley Some of you will already know that the Bentley Wood Wildlife Buffer Zone group was set up in 2022 and now consists of almost 200 people, living in villages surrounding Bentley Wood SSSI in south-east Wiltshire, who want to create a nature-friendly buffer zone around the...

Artificial nest sites, which of course includes nestboxes, have become a feature of British gardens, woodlands and nature reserves in the last 40 to 50 years, even diversifying into special “walls” for Sand Martins, concrete riverbank tunnels for Kingfishers and even Osprey nest platforms. Centuries earlier, the First Nation peoples of North America and Canada...

It’s early October and the evening skies above our house are unusually quiet and devoid of movement. A week ago ’our’ colony of house martins were feeding low over neighbouring grass fields and lined up on wires above waiting for the wind to swing round. In previous years the majority left around the autumn equinox...

As I write this article at the end of March, I am eagerly awaiting the arrival of the first house martin back in the colony on my Suffolk cottage. Last spring, the earliest arrival date for this forty year old colony was broken by the earliest ever arrival on 1st April. The weather forecast had...

When I began building my house at Crumlin in early May 1999, I noticed a huge flock of house martins availing of a large patch of mud which lay exposed for quite a long time at the lower corner of my site. I had been busy integrating sixteen swift boxes into the soffit of the...

House martins collecting mud – May 19th 2022 On 19th May 2022 the house martins in Gilling East were gathering mud to build or repair nests. I crouched against a garden wall with my sketchbook and watercolours to hand in a position which enabled good views, without disturbing their activity. I did receive some rather...

Global Birdfair was held on 15, 16 and 17 July 2022 at Rutland Showground, Oakham UK. Global Birdfair was held on 15, 16 and 17 July 2022 at Rutland Showground, Oakham UK. Having spent my career as an accountant I had almost no experience of helping to organise and run a stand at a major...