Hitchin Nub News aims to support our community, promoting shops, businesses, charities, clubs and sports groups.

We profile some of these businesses and organisations regularly in a feature called 'Up Close in Hitchin' while also encouraging opinion pieces from our readers and trusted contributors.

Here's our popular columnist 'Sparky', back with his wonderful nature column.

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One swallow does not make a summer, but a gulp may well signal the end.

This was a first for me locally: on Monday morning last week by Oughton Head Farm, I saw a gulp of swallows, hundreds strong.

Ranged on the wires, perched on telegraph poles, squabbling on the ground or wheeling noisily in the warm air, there were far too many to count and all seemed to be very happy to be out and about on this perfect late summer's day.

Although it is difficult to be totally certain about anything in the natural world, it is likely that this group were flocking in the departure lounge; chattering and feeding whilst awaiting the signal to start their epic six-week flight to South Africa.

And just like us at the airport, the excitement at their imminent escape was palpable. I deliberately returned to the same spot a few days later to check and saw not a dickie bird: they had all gone.

The swallow (Hirundo rustica) is the countryside-dwelling but surprisingly unrelated lookalike of that other popular avian migrant, the swift (Apus apus), but these are smaller in wingspan than that screeching urban acrobat.

The swallow arrives earlier too (usually in mid-April rather than May) and hangs around a month longer, departing in September.

Rarely seen in towns, they do enjoy a similar diet of airborne insects, but this time caught over fields, hedgerows and rivers rather than over our houses and town centres.

While here for our summer they can raise up to three broods of voracious chicks in their often re-used mud, grass and feather cup nests which can be found in barns and other farm outbuildings.

They are a delightful and welcome visitor to our shores and are fortunately still common enough to lift many a heart when seen on a country walk. How Lovely.

So, if it's just one swallow that 'doesn't make a summer' (as the old saying says), what do hundreds make?

A proper summer, I reckon, although we have to wait for the end to see so many together. And one of the few positives to emerge from this, the strangest of years, is that some of us have had some extra time outside to witness such natural wonders.

Tuesday saw the autumn equinox, the point in the year when our nights start becoming longer than the days, and this is also the time when many swallows also decide to leave us.

And bang on cue the weather is getting colder and wetter.

That mild pang of season change regret that many felt with the departure of the swifts in mid-August was understandable but maybe a tad premature: now is probably the time to say a sad and final farewell to summer.

But it, like the swallows, will be back.

Goodbye and wish us luck, little chums.

Sparky