House Martins are smashing birds. They arrive here in early Spring every year from southern Africa in order to follow their instincts to travel north, mate and rear their young.
We have 3 House Martin nests on our house, one each on the east and west gable end and one under the small overhang to the north. Most of the houses around us have House Martin nests which is great. They are most welcome and we consider it a privilege that they choose to nest on our house.
There are no House Martin nests on the south facing side of any house here that overlooks the fields. I've checked and there isn't a single one, although there are south facing nests on houses that don't overlook the fields but these seem to be in solid shadow most of the day as the construction of the houses is different. This seems to bear out the oft-quoted fact that House Martins prefer to nest facing north or east.
So why did a House Martin start to build a nest next to one of our bedroom windows where no House Martin has gone before? It also didn't appear to have seen the plans for the nest, as it used a scatter-gun approach to positioning the mud pellets over a brick and a half before abandoning the attempt and going, I hope, down the pub. Any chicks born in a nest where this bird started building may well have baked very nicely under the heat from the Sun as there is little or no shade through the day.
In this bird's defence I have now looked at several other nests and the walls around the nests look to be liberally scattered with mud pellets, suggesting that they start to place pellets quite randomly before a pattern of a nest may emerge? One thing is for sure, they don't have OCD 😃😃😃
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