Sand Martins

After fishing various rivers this year(severn-Lugg-teme-) i have noticed the absence of Sand Martins skimming over the water and couldnt see any burrows in the sand banks where you could always find them nesting...i know the floods have ripped the banks apart but even before this there were no sign of them.....

loads on the Dane & Eden earlier this year, not looked lately though.

The reason you see them on the river is they are nesting and raising a brood. When that is completed they are off again. The time they actually spend here is no more than 10 weeks. Swift are the same. Swallows and house martins are here much longer.

On the Ribble they're usually gone by the end of July.

I also suspect that a lot of the nests/eggs failed this year because of the rain and relatively cold temperatures through it. We may see even less of them next year through it, and it might take several years to build up a reasonable national population again.

Loads on the Ribble early on, mostly house martins and swallows at the moment. I've noticed up here in the Dales the swallows are beginning to gather in small family groups. Sad thing this year we always had two pairs nesting in our loose boxes but none this year. Had a few popping in and out but no babies this year.

loverly birds when you can see them

Cakey couldn?t agree more!
Very little more pleasing on the eye than to stand in the carpark of one of the stretches I fish and watch the Sandies going in and out of the earth bank facing it. Always make me a bit sad when they?re gone :0(

Yep, there are quite a few spots on there where you can stand directly over the sand banks and watch them come and go right below your feet.

The numbers going in and out and the speed of them is amazing as they fly out over the river.

I hadn't considered the how the unusual high water levels will have affected them this year until now. What would they actually do about nesting in high water conditions?

ok chaps ,well at least they are still around and thats good enough for me

Paul
If the river comes up abnormally high, the holes of all riverbank nesting birds get swamped out and the eggs/chicks are lost.

If that loss comes early in the egg incubation period, the birds may dig a fresh hole and lay another clutch.
If however, it?s late in that period, a few days before hatching, the birds tend to give up for that year.
Where there are chicks in the nest when the river swamps the nest, it?s most unlikely that the birds will re-nest.
This is when you get a population crash, which is not normally noticed in the UK until the following year.
The nest digging strategy the bird use is to dig the holes as high up the bank as possible. There?s several advantages to this strategy, it avoids flooding out of the nest, stops predation, and gives the eggs a pretty even temperature in the hole. The latter is helpful to the parent birds, as they can feed themselves up before the onslaught of 18 -20 hour days of chick feeding. Most long distance summer visitors arrive having used up most of their body fat and energy reserves.
There is also a kind of pecking order in the colony, the more experienced/mature birds getting the heist nest holes and lest experienced first year nesters, nesting lower down the cliff face.
Whether territories are actually fought over or not, I?m not sure. My instinct is, it probably due to the experience of the birds, the old hands as it was, know where and what to do.

I was just reading that they spend 90% of their life on the wing !