I was taking a stroll on one of those lovely long midsummer evenings, watching the swallows swooping low over the fields for their final feed of the day. They were calling occasionally, a gentle veet veet, which is their standard conversational contact call. But suddenly one gave a much louder, piercing cry and they all instantly scattered as if in a shock-wave and dived for safety. I looked up and knew what I’d see – the sinister dark silhouette of a falcon shearing through the sky. This was the swallow’s special ‘hobby alert’ call.
Most of our common birds of prey – kestrel, sparrow hawk, buzzard, peregrine and red kite – are resident in Britain throughout the year, but we have one that is just a summer visitor, the hobby. Why only in summer? Well, that’s when its favourite prey is available, the swallows, martins and swifts, which it follows here each spring. And it’s the only raptor with the specialist aerial skills to catch them. Swifts and swallows are wonderful fliers themselves, of course, but they are no match for a hunting hobby, which is capable of breath-taking twists and turns at high speed to chase them down on the wing. It’s such a deadly threat that the swallows have evolved this special call as an air-raid warning. Hobbies also take dragonflies in large numbers, which they do with almost nonchalant ease, plucking them from the sky as they cruise along and then nearly stalling in mid-air to strip out the soft bodies and consume them in flight.
Seen close-up, hobbies are very handsome birds with slate-coloured backs, white cheeks, black moustaches and rufous feathered ‘trousers’. But they are quite easy to distinguish in flight, too. Unlike a kestrel they never really hover, but scythe around, alternately soaring and diving on sharply angled wings, rather like huge swifts. They are much smaller than, say, buzzards. Indeed, their Latin name is Falco subbuteo and since a buzzard is a buteo this literally means ‘a falcon one size down from a buzzard’. And herein lies an etymological curiosity. Do you remember the table-football game called Subbuteo, which was very popular in the last century? The inventor of that game, one Peter Adolph, wanted to call it ‘Hobby’, partly because it was a hobby in the other sense of ‘pastime’ and partly because the hobby was his favourite bird. But when in 1948 he tried to register it as a trade-mark under that name, the Patents Office refused him for some reason, so he called it by its Latin name instead and they approved that. A little natural history sometimes helps.
Jeremy Mynott
9 June 2025
