Swooning For Swallows
Animal groups have special names: a gaggle of geese, for example; or a pride of lions, a school of fish, a parliament of owls. For swallows, like the barn swallows nesting on my front porch, there are at least three accepted collective nouns: a gulp (presumably for how many insects they eat every day), a flight, or a swoop. All three are quite appropriate, but I like the third one the best because of the swooping word’s alliteration with swallows.
Barn swallows are pretty special to me, because after I moved in at the old Citzler Homestead in 1983, their annual return by the second weekend every March was a ritual I loved to see. I was working in Seguin all week, and when I got to the farm in spring on a Friday evening, their antics of flight (swooping, indeed) were so beautiful to watch from the large front porch, that it became a “decompression” ritual to sit and watch them for an hour or so (and a cold beer didn’t hurt the situation, either!). The birds loved to swoop through the porch pillars, perch on the window sills, scan the ceiling for bugs or spiders, or just pause, perhaps, to catch their breath and rest their wings a bit, much like I was doing.
After the fire here in fall 2011, which burned down the old 1912 house I lived in as well as the barn, I persuaded my folks (who lived next door, and whose house was still standing afterwards, thanks be to God!) to give up their porch to the barn swallows (who were now short two nesting locations), so when the birds returned in March of 2012, they had a spot to paste up their mud-hollow nest and rear two sequential hatches of babies.
Once my house was rebuilt and I moved back in (2013), the birds quickly abandoned the porch at Mom and Dad’s house and moved to my porch instead. As there was less coming and going during the week, it was a less stressful place, presumably, for nesting and for all their own commotion of feeding two sets of four to five babies from mid-June to mid-July. Now, in spite of my living here all the time, the resident pair continue to raise their babies in a nest perched atop one of my porch pillars, which has a perfect three-inch extension platform (pillars being larger than the beam) on the inside, away from the wind and rain.
The world, however, is ever-more-challenging for birds, and swallows are no exception. A number of years back these birds (along with many other species) were ravaged by disease in their winter habitats, and I had no swallows at all for several years in a row. Then, two years back, a pair returned to nest here again. [Purple martins were similarly affected when the swallows disappeared, and I still have had no martins nesting in my two martin boxes ever since, though this year there were a few martin scouts who dropped by to check out the accommodations, at least. So maybe there’s hope for next year?] Even now, without the stress of a job and the need for a Friday evening decompression time, I find that the swallows still bring peace and joy to my soul: I sit outside in the morning, in my small enclosed part of the big porch, windows on three sides, and watch them as I sip my coffee. The birds are now on their second incubation. In the same nest as in early June, the female and male appear to be trading off sitting on the clutch of eggs, with a gathering of as many as 10 or 12 (presumably the 5 babies of the first hatch among them) watching for a few seconds from a perch on the windowsill, but more often, swooping around, chirping, doing acrobatics, almost seeming to be entertaining the one whose boring job of incubating must be torture for a bird that so obviously loves to swoop around instead.
I know swallows make a mess, dear readers, and when they appear in spring, many of you are forced to do battle to stop them from nesting right above your front door or above the picture window at your breakfast table. But please, do be as accommodating as you can for these marvelous creatures: they deserve every help we can give them at a time when bird populations appear to be collapsing around the world.
Being able to share the swooping of swallows with your children or grandchildren will be a blessing worth every bit of poop you have to clean up. After all, these persistent birds are just doing what God made them for: to nest where they can, cut back the mosquito population, and bring us joy.