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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...
Since my last update we have updated our website to enable members and supporters to make donations to the charity. We have been incredibly grateful to see just how many of you are making donations for all sorts of reasons. Only last month we received a donation from a new member who joined us after...
I am going to tell you about an audio documentary. I must tell you before you read on, I’m not going to give anything away. If you want to know more, you’ll have to listen to it! This audio documentary is not just about birds. I suppose you could say it’s about people with a...
In June we had a total of 26 nesting pairs, three of which arrived in June. Judging by their smart feathering they were later bred young from last season rather that failed breeders from other colonies. three pairs arriving here in June is average for this colony. In June we had a total of 26...
During March to May, house martins began to arrive from Africa for their six month summer holidays again this year in Old Dairy, Okeford Fitzpaine.   The male bird arrives with a new wife every year, either to the existing mud nest he built the year before or they embark on building a new mud...