You know what’s fucked up as all hell?  Swifts and swallows are not closely related.  They look the same, they fly the same.  Swifts don’t have the iridescence.  That’s it.  They’re drab, but they’re winners.  Perversely, they are more closely related to hummingbirds than the iridescent and flashy swallows are.  I don’t know much about them, but I can paint one little scene for you…

Long before we were married, my husband and I were trying to live in Seattle, on the brink of getting bodily ejected by the cost of rent.  He was in the habit of taking the bus down to see his mother in Federal Way every weekend, and I began to go with him.  Most weekends were just a lil shopping, a visit to a park, eat at a restaurant one time, that kind of stuff.  Some weekends were family parties, crowded affairs where children were showered with gifts.  I appreciated it for food somebody else cooked, my husband felt some other type of way.  I remember the grass being dead yellow, tiny children being in the living room while a movie about lingerie women getting decapitated by a crude 3d sabertooth tiger played.

On one occasion, spring or summer, there were cool birds outside, nesting under the eave of the garage.  This was only about seven or eight feet off the ground, so real easy to see the babies yelling for food, and parents flapping in to give them a little.  They fly so fast, so fancy, it was a treat to watch them.  I’d seen them on the way in, and after the party had been running for a while, I stepped back outside to take another look.

As I was trying to watch the swifts fly above, I witnessed an insect doing a real similar type of predation.  I caught sight of a random gnat just in time to see a dragonfly buzz by and make it disappear.  If swifts or swallows are biting each other’s styles, both of them are biting dragonfly style.

There was some discussion of evicting the birds to do roofing, and I was like nay.  Intolerable!  I looked up the species, found out vaux’s swift fledges in a very short amount of time, and let them know.  As far as I know, they let the creatures live and did the work afterwards.  As far as I know.

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Swallows is the same.  More or less.  I mentioned how they partition niches based on where they feed, with barn swallows down low?  Violet-green swallows feed higher up, around seven to twelve meters.  They are white beneath, and green and violet on top.  More or less.  At that elevation and as fast as they fly, I’d have never been able to ID them, without a few exceptional sunny days.

My father is harried by demons and can’t stand living in the same place more than a few months.  As he’s gotten old, he’s had to slow down the rate of moves more than he would prefer.  But after the first time he got a housing voucher, he briefly lived in an old folks home overlooking the Green River.  There he went off the rails for birding, for the first time ever, getting too much equipment and drawing too many birds, which bothered the neighbors.  One time he filmed a seal swimming in the river – way upstream from the Sound.  I wasn’t there for most of it – certainly not for the inevitable problem era when he made everybody too mad and flamed out and lost the home.  But I did have one visit.

On that occasion, we sat on his balcony on a sunny day, about ten meters elevation.  Ever sit on a balcony above a body of water?  In the summer?  The fucking insects were huge.  Creepy things I can’t even describe, multiple inches.  They eventually scared me indoors.  But before they did, I saw many violet-green swallows from above, from pretty close by, and that means I could see the violet-green distinctly shining in the sun.

Some years later, at the same Uwajimaya that once made my home boy herfy, I came out into the bright summer sun and saw violet-green swallows swooping around a paved corporate courtyard that usually only has house sparrows, pigeons, and gulls.  Were they nesting in the rafters of Uwajimaya, or the buck nasty hobo bar Joe’s?  It was a little magical.  I have no idea how they were getting enough food without those fat river insects.

Last place I saw them was in (hopefully) the last apartments I ever lived in, up in Federal Way.  There were swallows flying around at the usual height, with white bellies.  I couldn’t make out the top color, but I used the birding app to recognize their squeaks.  Violet-green.

They’re pretty cool.  If you’re in their range, hope you get to see them someday.

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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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Swallows is the same.  I would have been very justified in only doing one life list entry for all of them, because they aren’t all that different from each other, to an inexpert eye.  Normally I wouldn’t be able to pick out differences like this, but I have had some fortunate encounters over the years which made those differences more plain – situationally.

Cliff swallows are much like barn swallows – white and orange on bottom, iridescent blue on top – but the orange white and blue are in funkier stripes and swatches on cliff swallows.  Their look reminds me of over-designed tennis shoes.  That’s why barn swallows are the ones in tattoos.

I guess the main difference would be nesting in cliffs?  And artificial structures that have similar qualities, like under bridges and eaves.  The only reason I’ve ever seen one well enough to positively ID it – to tell the difference between it and a barn swallow – is that there is a nesting site at the Billy Frank Jr Nisqually National Wildlife refuge, which for all I know has an invisible dei in front of its url and is about to be renamed The White Mayonnaise National Pile of Mosquitoes and Birds We’re Going to Kill Wetland Condos.

That nesting site is a covered walkway near the visitor center, which has nests used by multiple species of swallows, rubbing shoulders with each other.  They’re so close to passers by that you could reach out and grab them*.  Fantastic!  I don’t know what season they’re around, don’t remember what time of year I was there because seasons not very distinct in the PNW.  But if you can find that out and pay a visit, you will get swallows on your own life list.

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*don’t, of course.

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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