OSPREYS apart, there has been some other bird interest of note in recent weeks at the Loch Garten/Abernethy reserve and the wider area - with the arrival of swifts.
They have been in the area for a while now but, in recent days, have been very much in evidence over Loch Garten and the surrounding forest, and have even been seen buzzing low past female osprey EJ and her brood on their nest.
Swifts are spectacular birds but are difficult to get a good look at on account of their innate restlessness.
So fast do they fly and so agile and deft are they in their manoeuvres that they are tricky to keep up with.
All birds are clearly amazingly adapted for flight (except the flightless ones, of course) but swifts are agility incarnate.
Our swift, Common Swift (Apus apus), is 17cm long with sickle-like wings of 40cm span, and with these sheer blades they scythe through the air at phenomenal speeds.
Some members of the swift family, of which there are 98 species world-wide, are amongst the fastest flying birds. They are some of the highest fliers too, allegedly seen by airline pilots at great altitude.
My favorite swift fact: not only do they feed on the wing, mate on the wing, they even sleep on the wing. They only come to "ground" to nest, and given that some swifts do not breed for the first time until they are four years old, that means some swifts are flying non-stop for four years!
How fantastic is that.
I say come to "ground", but in fact that is something swifts never do. They nest principally in buildings; in gaps in masonry, under loose tiles, in the eaves, fascias and soffits of buildings.
Favourite places are church towers, cathedrals, castles and other gothic buildings often steeped in folklore and legend with spooky gargoyles.
This coupled with their sinister dark brown, almost black plumage and their maniacal screaming calls, have earned the birds their old country name of Devil Bird.
Surveys have revealed that virtually all swifts nest in/on buildings - 77% of them in houses. Older houses suit them best because they are likely to have more nooks and crannies than newer builds.
From the survey, it was found that over half the buildings in use by swifts were over 90 years old and a quarter of them built between 1919 and 1944.
Our Common Swift would once have nested on cliffs and crags, in cracks in rock faces etc, but they have since adapted to man-made cliffs that we call buildings.
They will nest in trees too, a practice that was presumably more widespread than nowadays before buildings became available, but here at the Abernethy reserve we have a relic population of tree-nesting swifts.
We have pairs that are utilising holes created by woodpeckers, but also nesting in cracks and holes in old dead trees.
Some of these trees are decades and decades old - another important reason to do what we can to retain aged, veteran trees for swifts and so much more biodiversity too.
But given that most swifts these days nest in buildings there are things we must do here too.
Swift numbers have fallen in recent times, declining by one third across the UK and are a now a species placed on the amber list of importance - birds of serious conservation concern.
The reasons for their decline are not fully understood, and as migrants to UK like our ospreys, what issues they face and befall them in their winter quarters we cannot always know. UK swifts winter in Zaire and Tanzania for example.
But when they are here with us in UK, in our charge, there are measures we can take to help. Modern buildings these days are almost hermetically sealed, denying swifts access. The restoration and modernisation of their favoured old buildings, can exclude swifts also.
To help reverse these impacts and the decline of swifts, RSPB has just issued information, to encourage people to report their swift sightings, (www.rspb.org.uk/helpswifts) to help build up a picture of their distribution and areas that are important for them.
This can then be used to encourage planners, developers and building companies to incorporate swift measures in their thinking; to protect existing nest sites and make provision for swift access to buildings or to install swift boxes and "swift bricks" to provide new nesting areas for them.
If you need to do repairs to your roofs and soffits etc, try and schedule work outwith the period that swifts are with us, from mid-May to mid-August
Swifts are a complete joy to watch and to hear, their screaming calls are the epitome of summer.
Grantown's High Street, the Boat Hotel and Nethybridge Hotel are brilliant places to see and hear swifts.
If you enjoy the sight and sound of them and miss them when they are not here, try this to break up the long Highland winter.
Find a re-run of Inspector Morse. The series was set amongst the spires of Oxford - perfect buildings for swifts, and it would seem, always filmed in summertime, so no matter what the time of year you can be up-lifted by the screams of swifts often to be heard in the background.
They are deserving of our care and conservation for another reason - they eat midges!
They feed on the wing, sweeping up aerial plankton in their wide gaping mouths, all manner of insects but chief amongst them, the much maligned midge.
They feed their young on food balls of insect pulp, each containing between 300 to 1,000 insects, amounting to 3,000 insects per day.
With young swifts (swiflets) in the nest for up to 43 days and with up to 50,000 plus pairs of swifts in UK, well, you do the maths, but it must add up to billions of insects.
Without swifts, we'd be up to our necks in them, so bring 'em on I say, and why not get on out there to enjoy them while you can, they'll be gone by mid-August.
Oh, and report your sighting to www.rspb.org.uk/helpswifts please.
THIS Country Diary was supplied by Richard Thaxton, site manager for the RSPB at Loch Garten. Sightings for the column can be reported to Nic Bullivant at nic.bullivant@cairngormmountain.org.
