Kitchen Garden Forum

If you usually see housemartins, give them a hand this month and put out some mud, an upturned bin lid will do.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-13408464

...or send them to Wales where the mud is almost liquid or to Geoff in the Forest of Bowland

viewtopic.php?p=92741#p92741

Still picking on us

I would love to see some swallows or house martins actually collecting the mud but we have all newish houses round here and most of them have modern plastic eaves & soffits which sadly make them usuitable for nesting, so even though we see them around the older properties in our village centre, and flying overhead, they never actually fly down.

I fear my newly watered, now muddy border will be wasted.

Building sites are usually much favoured by house martins because of the mud! When our house was first built (more than 30 years ago), we had house martins under many of the new eaves and we even fixed an artificial nest under ours to encourage them (now used extensively as a blue tit roost). Then when the gardens were established, the house martins moved to the other end of the village where houses were being built. When their gardens were no longer suitably muddy, the house martins moved to the moor where Yorkshire Water built a large new water purification plant at a reservoir. That took two or three years - and now the house martins have almost all gone, just a few left at a farm.

One of our daughters who lives at a town edge but near a river certainly still has lots of house martins around.

I think tracks and farms are just too clean and tidy for mud nest builders nowadays.