I made it to Texas this week. The swallows were here first.
I’m back to visit a friend and continue my quest to eat all the smoked brisket in the Lone Star State. My physician refuses to endorse my gluttony, but he does endorse my statin prescription, so he contributes, nonetheless.
My friend, The Golf Guru, is one of those guys who approach life with a fairway wood when laying up with an iron might be the prudent approach. I’m the opposite. On those rare occasions I golf, I almost always reach for my 7-iron.
Since I last visited, The Guru’s neighborhood has been overrun by an exploding population of bunnies. What this place needs is a predator reintroduction program. More dramatically, a pair of barn swallows built a mud nest above his patio. There’s now a pair of fledglings in the nest. The swallow family is making a terrible mess of things, but The Guru’s primary outdoor recreation space is his garage rather than the patio. He enjoys greeting his neighbors as they take their morning constitutionals so he’s letting it slide until the young ones fly off.
Barn swallows are found on every continent, sans Antarctica. During breeding season, you’ll find them in all U.S. states though they migrate to South America for winter. These gorgeous little birds have iridescent blue backs with orange bellies and face masks.
Those colorful feathers were so popular with hat makers in the late 1800s that it led to calls from conservationists to rein in the plume trade. An editorial on the threat to the barn swallows and other birds, written by George Bird Grinnell for Forest & Stream Magazine, led to better bird conservation and the creation of the Audubon Society.
The birds share a familiar swept-back wing profile with other members of the swallow family. Barn swallows also have distinctive forked tails that make them easy to identify. The website allaboutbirds.org reports that the legend suggests the bird stole fire from the gods to share with humans and an enraged god hurled firebrands at the escaping thieves, burning away their middle tail feathers.
This gift was generous of the birds though they do look snazzy in tails. In return, humans now provide most of the sites — bridges, tunnels, barns — where the birds build their nests. The birds once nested almost exclusively in caves, but today the only North American population still doing so breeds in the Channel Islands off California.
Barn swallows get most of their calories gulping flying insects. The birds are graceful fliers and their swept-back wings remind me of jet fighters. I’ve always imagined swallows as serene, gentle birds, zipping about the garden, happily suppressing the local mosquito population.
That was before The Guru mentioned he’d been surprised by how aggressively the swallows guarded their patio nest. He’d learned the birds could be nest raiders, so their vigorous defense of their mud hut made sense.
This inspired me to read up on the private lives of these little terrors. Nest raids are a common thing. Sometimes unpaired males will kill nestlings and in the ensuing chaos mate with the grieving, temporarily childless female.
Male swallows have more breeding-season tricks to ensure they pass along their DNA. Since the birds often nest in colonies, they have alarm calls that summon adults to action, dive bombing any threats. Sometimes, male barn swallows, concerned with the attention another male is paying their mate, issue a false alarm as a means of distracting the birds from their amorous desires.
Since barn swallows are such effective insectivores, humans often encourage them to nest nearby. It’s a harbinger of bad luck to disturb a barn swallow nest before the hatchlings have left the nest.
So, for now, The Guru’s decision to spare the fairway wood, and let the birds be, might be the path to happiness.