There’s always something magical about seeing the first Swallows and Swifts, Sand and House martins arrive from their warmer southern over-wintering locations – it feels like the promise of warmer weather and our northern summer is flowing along with them. I reported on the arrival of the first House martins in early April (Another new arrival, 11 April) (and you were treated [?] to one of the bird drawings I’ve struggled to produce during my self-imposed 2024 drawing challenge), and a couple of days later I wrote about the Sand martins I’d been watching as they began collecting nesting materials (Sand martin magic, 13 April). Several times that month I returned to watch the Sand martins as they went busily about their nesting preparations – the photo below was taken on one of those occasions, on the Cardiff Bay Barrage on 23 April.