AN EXCEPTIONAL BARN SWALLOWS WEEKEND

World famous Barn Swallow Site

The weekend of 19/20 March was an outstanding weekend. South Africa’s premiere investigative television programme, Carte Blanche, requested to come and find out about the swallows at Mount Moreland, our work with them and, of course, their future safety in face of the new King Shaka Airport.

The Carte Blanche team  arrived Thursday evening, following a busy day’s filming at the new airport. They went straight down to the bottom of the Mount Moreland view site with our ‘creative’ Angie for some great shots of the swallows arriving home to the reedbed. On Friday morning Derek Watts, Carte Blanche’ s best known host, fired questions and more questions at us – all in front of the camera, of course. After a short respite, while the CB team went off to film the swallow detect radar, it was down to the reedbeds for filming the setting up of the nets for catching the swallows and interviewing ringer, Andrew Pickles. Of course, the piece de resistance was back at the Gazebo for the processing and ringing of the swallows which had everyone ‘ohing’ and ‘ahing’ at the opportunity to get up close up and personal with these tiny miraculous flying machines, the barn swallows.

While there is assuredly enough footage for a full length movie we shall be lucky if we, and the swallows, get a few minutes on Carte Blanche – maybe on this Easter Sunday or Sunday12 March – the Editor holds sway. It must surely be before the  King Shaka International Airport opens on 1 May 2010.

And the facts and figures for the weekend were

·         63 and 43 (106) swallows ringed - bringing our total to over a thousand for the season;

·         93 + 125 ( 218) Mount Moreland view site swallow watchers – some from Scotland, England, New Zealand 

·         15 swallow ringing visitors;

·         two birthdays and a reunion.

·         And thanks to a article by environmental journalist Leon Marshall our website was linked with NatGeo’s website

20 March 2010.