Does one House Martin make a summer?

At Chafford this morning I spent a good hour or two standing in a lake, picking up empty bottles abandoned by visitors,  as April showers chucked buckets of water over me and my colleagues. It was worth it to see another part of the reserve gradually cleared of rubbish, and to see one of the lakes from an angle the public don't usually get to. We continued to work as the rain came down and the birdsong, and constant goose noise, went silent, and the storm past over us.

As we took a break for lunch, the sky began to brighten over the horizon, and gradually the rain eased. It seemed a few moments before the spring chorus began to come back to life, and a chiffchaff opened as the first rays of sunshine began to warm us as we trudged along the slippery lakeside path to pile up the rubbish we'd collected. As we headed up to the centre for a cup of tea, the birdsong, which seemed more intense after the rain, had returned, and we could hear the distinct two note, repetitious call of great tits, and the more melodic song of robins. A cormorant flew across the blue sky, perhaps on his way back from the relative shelter of the gorge to his fishing grounds on the Thames.

More showers passed that day, and sometimes I felt distinctly unspringlike, as I carried on helping with the litter pick in my wet clothes. I had returned to the visitors centre for a cup of tea, when, at the suggestion of one of the volunteers in the visitors centre, the Reserves Manager and I went outside onto the balcony overlooking the gorge-really an old chalk pit-to look at the Cowslips which were beginning to emerge on the steep bank down to the paths. Another bank of cloud was building opposite us, where the weather was coming fron, but for now there was an azure sky above our heads and bright sunshine. Several yellow Cowslip flowerheads, another pretty sign of spring, each composed of several small flowers, delicately nodding downwards with their long calyx,  had emerged since my last visit a week ago. We were discussing the impending summer butterflies (a gentleman had shown us a recent photo of a speckled wood he'd taken) when something in the blue sky caught my eye, a small, sparrow sized bird with distinctly pointed wings. It flew straight breifly, climbing up in the air before expertly swooping, slowing, and climbing a little to snatch an insect before gliding in a descending arc towards us, and back over the roof of the building. As it turned the sunlight caught on the metallic blue of its wings and it's pure, bright white rump and underside. I pointed at it and exclaimed something like "House Martin, first of the summer!" It flew one more pass of the roof of the building, and, amusingly, pooed right onto the centre roof, and was gone.

A lot of people have reported swallows or sand martins passing through, but this is the first I have heard of a Housey this year, and it was my first hirundine of the season, and a harbinger of the summer season, which makes it rather a special year tick for me.