Captured! :)

[tilia_tomentosa]

4 September was an unusually lucky day for my exercises in frustration attempts to photograph the house martins in my area. Yes, I was extremely lucky to come near this building at exactly the right time when they were flying to their nests and back feeding their young (ouch, still in the nests in early September!). I did get two photos with a blur

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[tilia_tomentosa]

Yes, they typically have two broods a year in Bulgaria, and now I wonder if this isn't even a third brood, being so late in the year. I wish I had watched them more closely to count the broods; now that I think of it, I somehow never notice the first brood for the year learning to fly; I guess that's because they aren't so common in my part of town as the swifts (most buildings here don't have the kind of eaves that house martins need to build their nests while the spaces between the wall panels of the soviet-era buildings are perfect for the swifts and bats).

It seems the adult house martins of my area will now have either to wait until the very end of September to give these youngsters a chance to learn to fly properly or leave them behind until they are ready to migrate on their own (if that's even possible) because there's no way for those youngsters still to manage a long-distance flight at this stage, or even in a week from now.

The swifts' current young are still in the nests, but that's OK because the swifts fly south later than the house martins, some time in late October.