Swallows is the same. This one looks like barn swallows but with no orange on bottom – just white beneath, iridescent blue on top. I haven’t seen them feeding as often as barn swallows or violet-greens, but when I have, it was even higher elevation than VGs, maybe twelve to twenty meters?
I have to imagine they got their name from nesting in trees, but I have seen them in nest boxes barely above human height, right out in the middle of a field. It’s the only reason I can say I’ve positively ID’d them before. I have also seen swallows on a bright day flying near treetops (in WA state) and thought, likely but not certain.
The place with the nest boxes was some kind of wildlife reserve next to a busy freeway in Kansas, because of course it was next to a busy freeway. It was the kind of place people come to have sad outdoor sex, with patchy clouds and drips of rain, the fields wet and marshy – dotted with bushes and small trees. My brother brought me there on the last day of a poorly planned visit, for last minute birding.
The visitor center had some taxidermy birds of prey. The red tailed hawk was smaller than I would have imagined. In the fields we saw a lot of red-winged blackbirds at various growth stages, and a few proud yellow meadowlarks. The weirdest thing we saw was these orange slimy gelatinous-looking finger-like structures on the branches of a small pine. Slime molds? An actual fungus? Fruiting bodies? I know next to nothing of these subjects.
The last thing we did that day before I got on the plane was going to a fast food place called Freddy’s. We don’t have those in WA state. They have skinny fries and smashed burgers with charred edges. That makes everything more crispy and rich. Baller. I’m not eating as much beef now because global warming, but if I get a chance to have that again, I will do it at least once. Gag in the Bag recently added “smashed” burgers to their menu, but if they aren’t also charred, they are missing the entire point.
Oh yeah, birds. Iridescent blue on top and white underneath. Cute. Fast. Maybe you can see them too.
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Tree swallows are cute and all, but they compete with bluebirds for nesting and steal their houses when they get a chance. Of course from the non human point of view a bird is a bird, but I for one would rather have bluebirds.
The stuff you saw on the pine may have been the fruiting body of a jelly fungus.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Auriculariales
currie – that shit is rugged. bad enough they get starling’d too.
stew – unless there’s a related species that grows upside down in tightly packed jelly cones, I don’t think so?
There are 200 species of Auriculariales (and another 250 jelly fungi in Tremellales). There’s a fair degree of morphological disparity among them.
A common species on Pinaceae is Exidia sacharrina. For all I know there may be others.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exidia_saccharina
Calocera cornea lookin the right shape and can grow on bottoms of branches, hm…
Consider also
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gymnosporangium
boom! you got it. this is about what it looked like.
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The fungus is growing on a cypress (or juniper), not a pine. I’m thinking Chamaecyparis, but there’s not enough to tell, and Wikipedia says that Gymnosporangium grown on Juniperus, Cupressus and Calocedrus.
that’s a problem of my lack of expertise tho – i wouldn’t know the difference between a juniper cypress and a pine. it had needles, that’s all I meant by my word choice in the article.