Yet another species with intercontinental distribution, depending on how you define species, barn swallows are the easiest swallows to meet. They feed low to the ground, favoring open fields like mowed parks, school grounds, golf courses, and graveyards. This is how I see them where I live; probably they have more natural circumstances in more rustic areas. Swallows take insect prey in flight without even slowing down, flapping and whooshing everywhere at extreme speeds. Their mouths are huge, open like a windsock when they suck down the bugs.
As common as they are, they are very beautiful – one of the stereotypical tattoos of hipsters for years. There are color variations, but mostly they have orange bellies and iridescent blue on top. I’ve only ever seen them sitting still at a considerable distance, drinking from a mud puddle at Point Defiance Zoo, or resting on the streetlamp in front of my condo.
Seeing them in flight, on the other hand? Real easy to do. It seems swallows partition their niches in part by elevation, and barn swallows feeding closest to the ground, you’re not unlikely to run into them. My husband told me that when he was very young, about seven or eight, a boy in his school accidentally kicked one. It survived, but that couldn’t feel great.
They do it to themselves. For some reason they are daredevils, intentionally flying in front of cars and bicycles and humans. This might be why they like cemeteries – the obstacle course – and moving obstacles are so much the better for demonstrating their agility. …Or they are trying to eat the bugs that are stirred up in front of us.
The first place I took special note of them was at Game Farm Park in Auburn, years before my current interest in birds began. They also made an impression at my husband’s uncle’s funeral, zipping through headstones. And once I saw a few in actual barn territory, when I went to rural Kansas for my brother’s wedding. His father-in-law took us out to some scratchy fields to look at dilapidated barns that had been in the family since colonial days.
Barn swallows? In my barn? It’s more likely than you think.
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Every time I mow the lawn in the summer the barn swallows attend me.
As I mow the insects leap into the air, to their delight.
Their dance surrounds me, the joyous swooping of summer.
I’m not sure what kind our swallows are, I think we just have the one species, white bib, orange stomach and that iridescent blue everywhere else. I love seeing them zooming around doing aerial acrobatics way more impressive than any plane.
I once saw maybe a couple of hundred gathering to start the autumn migration to Africa. There was an old stone built chapel in the V of a fork in the road, with five or six different sets of telephone wires going from the post in the chapel graveyard to the nearby houses. The wires were sagging with the weight of the swallows, all shuffling and twittering to each other, and the whole of the ^ of the front of the chapel was covered in birds clinging to the stone, sometimes starting to fall only to swoop up and try again. It was one of those absolutely stunning sights you sometimes see in quite mundane places. I was working at the former chapel, so I’d been there the day before when there were the usual few flying around the graveyard and surrounding fields, then the day of gathering, and the next day they were gone. Off to find the warmer air with active insects they could eat way down south. Thank you for reminding me of that Bebe!
These guys are winners, it seems. That definitely sounds like barn swallows, Jazz. I’ve never seen anything like those numbers. Rad.