They come back every year. Welcome, as welcome, after almost seven months of snow, is the warm season which drives them back here. I'm obviously speaking of migratory birds. Usual presences they are, whether they are on the top of a tundra covered peak – as Dotterel and Golden Plover on Nipfjället, or in the village's gardens – as Pied Flycatcher. The appointment with the two plovers is a kind of ritual of mine: they arrive in May, when the snow is melting on the high altitudes and I'm busy in my own spring migrations. In June I am seeking them, and the quest sanctions that my summer has begun; I find them where I left them at the end of the previous one (you can see other images of Dotterel in the Chronicles from June 2008 and July 2010). All Swedes, instead, are looking after the Pied Flycatcher, and they fill their gardens with nestboxes, gladly used by the small bird in black&white. I've seen them darting from tree to tree for years, and these are two simple documentary shots I delayed for a long time.
Why doing them now? Because the nestbox is the one in my garden, this time, and its residents have been our next-door neighbours along June. We saw them courting, breeding, struggling to feed always hungrier and noisier chicks, defending the area from fieldfares, magpies and even squirrels (the lovely rodent is a skilled eggs predator. We all have a dark side). Until the beginning of this week, when the nest was suddenly quiet, and the surrounding trees deprived of the frantic coming and going of the parents. A new offspring is out there, now; we'll meet next year.