Archive for May, 2008
Oskaloosa Herald, IA
By PETE EYHERALDE MCCB Naturalist
The Oskaloosa Herald
OSKALOOSA —
A sure sign of spring flew back into Iowa this week. The barn swallows. Step outside in the late afternoon and you’ll see them swooping and soaring as they catch mosquitoes and other flying insects.
This week I’ve seen them at the Russell Wildlife Area, flying over Maskunky Marsh and nesting in the barn at Caldwell Park. Adults have a long, deeply forked tail that distinguishes them from other swallows. The upperparts are glossy blue. The rest of the wings and tail are black with a blue or blue-green gloss. On the underside of the tail are small white patches. The forehead, chin and throat are deep chestnut color. Males and females look the same.
As their name suggests, barn swallows often nest in barns. A barn usually supports a colony and the nests of six to eight pairs. Nests are built with straw and mud and lined with feathers. These birds may take 1,000 trips to gather mud, which is worked into a pellet and carried to the nest site in the birds’ bills. Barn swallows usually build their nests close to the ceiling on a beam or tucked under the eaves.
Originally, barn swallows built their nests on cliff faces and in caves and rock crevices, but now such nest sites are rare. These days you’ll find most barn swallow nests on human built structures such as buildings, bridges, mine shafts and culverts. I always love to watch the ones that nest on my porch. Their graceful swooping and soaring mean less bugs in the yard on summer evenings.
When feeding young, the swallows fly all day long. It seems that they hardly ever rest. When a cat or other predator approaches their nesting site, the entire colony immediately mobs the intruder in a display of aerial acrobatics. Most of their hunting is done near ground level, over open fields and especially near water. However, on late summer afternoons, they can be seen hunting high in the air. They simply follow the insects, which, in turn, may be reacting to differences in air temperature.
Keep your eyes out for barn swallows this week and if you lucky enough they just might choose your building for a nest site.
May 26th, 2008
Houston Chronicle, United States - May 18, 2008
My daughter and son-in-law, who live in Rosenberg, have acquired some new tenants at their house. These tenants are short-term residents. They will only be here for the summer. They will be paying rent “in kind” by entertaining their landlords and by catching flying insects. Yes, the new tenants are Barn Swallows.
The swallows moved in earlier this spring and decided that they liked the look of my children’s front porch as a place to raise their family this summer. That light fixture hanging on the wall gave them the perfect platform for building their nest. It wasn’t a barn rafter, but it would do.
These birds, like their bigger cousins the Purple Martin, have a long-time association with humans. They have long chosen to build their nests on or in human structures like barns. Thus, their name. In fact, like the martin, they have virtually given up building nests on anything other than a human structure.
This is a symbiotic relationship - both parties benefit. The swallows gain a measure of protection from predators by nesting close to humans and the humans gain the services of a mighty hunter of annoying flying insects.
Barn Swallows eat a lot of flies, beetles and wasps as well as a variety of other insects. They fly close to the ground at the level where mosquitoes fly, so they are much more likely to be devourers of those pesky whiners than are the martins who do their hunting much higher up. And yet it is the martins who have the reputation as mosquito-eaters. Go figure.
As Susan and Wade watch the progress of their tenants’ nest, they should observe 4-5 eggs that are white with brown spots. Rarely, the female will lay more than five eggs. Once brooding of the eggs begins, both partners share the duties. Incubation takes from 13-17 days.
When the babies hatch, both parents work hard to feed them. Sometimes offspring from the pair’s previous brood will also help with feeding the new babies. The young leave the nest at 18-23 days old and start the process of learning to feed and support themselves. Occasionally, the pair will then raise a second brood.
Barn Swallows, like other members of their family, are generally faithful to a nesting site, returning to the same area to nest year after year. If my kids prove to be hospitable landlords to these birds, they may see them again next year.
True, there is one downside to being a bird’s landlord. Your tenants won’t carry around mop and pail to clean up after themselves, so the landlords might have to put up with a little mess for a few weeks, but it is all easily cleaned up once the birds are headed south again. And having these beautiful creatures around for a few weeks is worth a little mess. Don’t you agree?
May 20th, 2008
Times Online, UK - Apr 25, 2008
Wild Notebook: great nature writers of the past didn’t experience anxiety about the world
Simon Barnes
I look at nature in a way that was beyond the scope of the finest nature writers that ever saw a swallow and felt a joy. Gilbert White, Charles Darwin, John Clare: none of them ever looked at the sky in the last week of April and felt as I do. The dreadful anxiety is the unique privilege of 21st-century humans.
This sense of the world’s fragility is not something that troubled White, as he marvelled his way around Selborne, or Darwin, when every living thing he saw provided another question of bottomless profundity. But it troubles me: and this last week in April, the troubles become acute.
Regular readers of this space will be anxious for news about my back, damaged last week in the course of a newt hunt. Well, it’s much better, thanks, but I’m still pretty much tied to home. I need the wildlife to come to me. But that is something I need in this week before May every year: the week before the great explosion of life.
But will it explode? That’s what bothers me. I am scanning the skies and fretting. And every now and then: look, there really is a swallow, no, two. Nothing flies like a hirundine; you can tell them from miles off. Most birds go from A to B. Swallows go round and round.
So every time I see a bird going round and round, I give a small, relieved smile. The other night there were two of them, not chasing insects but swallows, goosing each other in the air and swapping perky double-note calls. That’s what I need to see: a bit of passion, a bit of life.
I need to hear the swallows chattering in the stables as they remake last year’s nests; I need to see the whitewash on the saddles in the tackroom; I need to duck when I enter the stables and a parent swallow swoops indignantly out. There’s time enough for all that, I know: but I need reassurance. I need to know that the great processes of life are under way.
No martins yet. Not a glimpse. They nest under the eaves of the house; perhaps they can trace their ancestry directly to the birds who nested here when the house was first built out of sticks and cowshit in the 16th century. But they’re not here yet; and this year, as every year, I find myself wondering if this time it won’t happen: if this time, it’s a year too far, and after five centuries the house will be martin-less.
Then I hear the merry farting call from the sky and see them going round and round and skimming under the eaves, seeking out last year’s nest, perhaps where they raised young, perhaps where they were hatched. But there were fewer last year than the year before: and even that was well down on the peak of a few years back.
Still too early for swifts, of course. Ted Hughes caught the anxiety that Clare never knew: “They’ve made it again,/ Which means the globe’s still working…” But for how much longer? The life of the long-distance migrant exists on the far edge of the possible: that is the glory of it, that is the fearfulness.
Well no doubt they’ll be back in a few days, this year anyway, and I’ll be back to hymning their glories in a world of cacophonous Maytime song beneath a sky crowded to bursting point with swifts and swallows and martins. But today I feel nothing but the world’s fragility: and that is every bit as real as its glories.
May 12th, 2008
Owen Sound Sun Times, Canada - May 6, 2008
Editor:
With the West Nile virus, spread by mosquitoes, with us each summer we are very lucky to have such active mosquito control as we do in this area with our free swallows, barn swallows, bank swallows and cliff swallows.
On a quiet summer evening several kinds can be enjoyed as they dart about over the water by the elevators hunting flying insects.
However there is no better place to observe family life of swallows than our own Grey Roots museum. The cliff swallow, a heritage bird which would have nested on the buildings of the pioneers, could not have chosen a better place to nest than a museum. This is the largest collection of cliff swallow nests we have seen this side of Dawson City in the Yukon.
Each nesting pair of swallows consume about 800 mosquitoes per day. By counting the number of nests and multiplying by 800 you get some idea of what a great benefit these birds are to the whole community in reducing the threat of West Nile. The only thing they want in return is a place to nest in peace and for us to tolerate or hose off the recycled mosquitoes they leave on the area below.
The saw mill, the barn, the school, etc., required a lot of work and expense to acquire. The swallows come for free, do their own building, put on a great show, help protect us from West Nile and make Grey Roots very unique.
All of the museum exhibits I have seen consist of lifeless relics from the past so Grey Roots is probably the only museum in Ontario with a living, vibrant exhibit.
The people who look after the museum are certainly to be congratulated for their farsightedness in taking advantage of this great opportunity.
Lorne Smith Owen Sound
May 9th, 2008
www.record-bee.com
By Terry Knight — Record-Bee outdoors columnist
Article Last Updated: 04/29/2008 11:39:22 PM PDT
Wildlife and fish have always amazed me. They are often born, live and die within a short distance from our homes and yet few of us know about their daily struggles just to survive. Unlike humans, a bird or deer can’t go to the doctor if they’re feeling ill or to the supermarket if they’re hungry.
One such bird that battles the elements to reach Lake County is the cliff swallow. This bird annually migrates to the county by the hundreds, yet few local residents understand how difficult it is for these little birds to fly here.
The cliff swallow is a tiny bird, weighing only a few ounces and is less than 6 inches long, yet it travels thousands of miles during its annual migration. The cliff swallow can be identified by its square tail, blue back and white forehead. Cliff swallows are considered “migratory birds” and spend the winter in South America. They start their migration north in the late winter or early spring. The famed swallows of the Mission San Juan Capistrano in Southern California are cliff swallows.
The swallows only migrate during daylight hours, the reason being that they have to feed as they fly. They feed on flying insects and they can catch even the smallest of insects. In fact, the start of swallow’s annual spring migration is based on the availability of insects.
Upon arriving at their selected nesting area they build nests beneath docks or beneath the eaves of buildings located near water. Often they return to the same nest from the previous year.
Their nests are gourd-shaped and made from mud and lined with feathers. The birds gather the mud by rubbing their chests and feet in the wet mud. The mud forms little balls and sticks to their chest and feet, which they then carry to the nest. One nest can contain up to 2,000 mud balls. The entrance to the nest always points downward. Both the female and male build the nest, which can take several days to complete.
They nest in colonies and some of the docks around the lake will hold up to a dozen or more nests. Bridges, such as the one that crosses Rodman Slough, are also popular nesting areas. The female lays from four to six white eggs. An unusual trait of the cliff swallow is that a female will often move her eggs into the nest of another swallow.
Both the male and female incubate the eggs, which hatch in 12 to 16 days. Within about 20 days after hatching the young are ready to fly.
After spending the summer in the county the swallows start their southward migration back to South America in late September. They are gone by mid-November.
Cliff swallows are either loved or hated depending on where they nest. They can be a problem for dock owners as they build mud nests beneath the roofs of the docks and on the sides of buildings that are located near the lake. The nests result in droppings and unwanted insects. There is even an insect called the “swallow bug” related to bed bugs.
Many dock owners around the lake install fine mesh nets around their docks to discourage the swallows from nesting. Some even go as far as to destroy the nests. Technically, because the swallow falls under the Migratory Bird Treaty Act of 1918, destroying an active nest or harming the bird is illegal. In fact, it’s illegal to disturb a swallow that is sitting on eggs. But there are ways to prevent the swallows from becoming a pest. Most of the methods consist of preventing the birds from building nests in the first place.
A good example is the Bank of America branch in Lakeport. For years the swallows built their nests on the wall above the ATM machine. Needless to say, the bank’s customers weren’t happy with bird droppings falling on them. B of A built nest barriers above the ATM machine, which resulted in the birds moving to new locations. The result is that the bank’s customers are happy and the swallows haven’t been harmed.
Lake County also has a close relative of the cliff swallow in the barn swallow. Whereas occasionally a barn swallow builds a nest on a dock, most build their nests inland. Its long, forked tail easily identifies a barn swallow. The interesting fact about barn swallows is that the female selects her mate by the length of his tail.
Swallows are important in that they help control the insects. They are also fun to watch as they dart around the docks.
The swallows are just one of many species of birds visiting Lake County each year. Most of the time they go unnoticed by local residents, but the cliff swallow is one bird that is a rare treat.
May 8th, 2008