A quiet day for birds. It’s excessive summer season: the moult, the post-breeding season lull, the birdwatching useless zone. It’s a sunless day of boiled white skies, so there are valuable few butterflies on the wing additionally, and no grasshoppers going skrrp within the grass.
On the trail beside Malham Beck – recent, burbling, the color of clear tea – I pause to observe a quivering younger yellow wagtail (not but yellow) being fed flies by its mom. Then with a zipper and a splosh, first the air after which the floor of the beck are deftly disturbed. A home martin, stooping to take a drink. It doubles again over our heads and comes round for a chaser. Zip, proper below our noses, and splosh, a fragile mouthful lifted from the water. Then gone, white backside flashing – away, again to the cliffs.
There’s a wierd dissonance that comes with seeing home martins nesting on cliffs – a peculiar feeling of time being warped or messed with. A feral pigeon on a sea cliff provokes the identical response. You? Right here? Now? After all they had been cliff birds. However we thought they’d moved on to one thing higher: us.
Malham Cove, an ideal sweeping crescent of rugged limestone scarp, 80 metres excessive, was a waterfall as soon as. Round 12,000 years in the past, torrents of glacial meltwater would have come cascading over this precipice and crashing down the valley. Who is aware of, maybe the home martins nested there again then, tucked behind the waterfall, as black swifts do in South America. They’re right here now, anyway.
Largely they’re a great distance up. It’s the climbers right here who come to know them greatest. On the climbing boards there are pleasant warnings to maintain from disturbing the breeding birds: they’re “regularly affecting” Seventh Aardvark and varied different routes; there are nests on the roof of Raindogs, the belay jugs of Thriller / Victor Hugo, and on Overnite Sensation.
We’re midway up the 400-odd stone steps that take us to the highest of the cove and its well-known limestone pavement once I hear a peregrine name. It’s a sound I’ve come to know nicely from the birds that frequent the tall chimney tops of commercial Bradford. Birds, as all the time, don’t have any sense of the place they must be, solely the place they’re.