Occasionally I am present of mind enough to look up and watch the swallows that live in my barnyard flying through the air.
Birds mark my year, seasonally and routinely, in a natural rhythm that I have been conscious of for about two decade now. Nature’s inconsistencies, whether it’s the fickle weather, fires or floods that adjust the landscapes, or our own propensity for sullying the environment, can be more easily held in heart thanks to the consistency of birds. In the late winter, it’s the migratory killdeer that arrive to spend the spring and early summer as well as the residential woodcocks who begin peeenting at dusk that insist the season on me. In the fall I always await the return of the dark-eyed junco who’s fast flocks zip and dart like dust devils, their white streaked tails giving them a swallow-like appearance (and giving them away to an amateur birder like myself). With the junco back on the farm I know that the field work is nearly over, and I will be in the company of these modest little Canadians through the winter into the new year.
Yellow warblers lift my spirit in the earliest warm weathers of spring and summer. Their song, sweet-sweet-I’m-so-sweet, is so bloody enduring, and they are so tiny and fragile that I am amazed how the season I most associate with ardor and strain is their high time to shine. Our full-year residents don’t go unappreciated of course. We are blessed in our woods and fields with great-horned and barred owls, accipetors, buteos, and the occasional bald eagle. Owls and red-shoulder hawks trade the perches on the farm from night to day, dead trees on the perimeter and our telephone poles in the interior. Barred owls are often seen on the tips of our deer fence posts, their heads turning like lighthouses, eyes black as hell. Mating flights of hawks are common, occasionally the exhibitionist couple can be seen copulating. This is usually at the same time that killdeers are protecting their first clutch of eggs, tucked into the vegetable fields or beneath the blueberry bushes. Pileated woodpeckers out-shout their quieter red-bellied cousins, and gold finches, robins, and catbirds dominate the open areas of our farm in summer time.
Of all these swirling, colorful creatures it is the barn swallow who most intimately enmeshes themselves in my life. The barn swallow, like the European house sparrow who won’t be found far outside of human habitation, has come to prefer people’s homes and outbuildings for their child rearing purposes. At my last farm, where I rented space in an old dairy farm for ten years, little was done to control nesting inside the building. Swallow nests would be plastered to virtually all the light fixtures on the shallow ceiling of the barn, and when broods were in their nests the adults would dive bomb anyone who walked through their domain. I have clear memories of that dirty old barn, piles of bird shit beneath the nests attracting copious amounts of flies, while the young chicks chattered as their parents swooped at lightening speed toward your face, turning so suddenly that you could feel the wind on your cheek.
When we built our own small barn on the farm I implemented a “no-swallow” policy inside the building. It can’t be helped, you really need to keep these areas clean, especially when you’re in the business of selling fresh fruits and vegetables. Again, the light fixtures are the preferred spot inside and inevitably a nest gets started by a pair of swallows that slip in at night. It’s amazing how quickly they can build these nests, finishing them in what seems like only a few days. If they are missed it is within a week or so before there are eggs inside and at that point, well, you lost. You are now the begrudging (or secretly excited) caretaker of a barn swallow brood. A nest was started this year in perhaps the most obvious and consequential place in my barn: directly over one of my wash tubs. I installed a diaper (a plastic bag held up by twine and roofing nails) under the nest, occasionally having to pop out one of the adults that fell in and got caught inside. The whole family survived and joined the other two swallow families that routinely nest under our lean-to outside.
Their were fifteen swallows in the barnyard this year with all eggs baring their signature frowny-faced chicks. Once the chicks are hatched the adults become protective. Since I am always the first person to stroll into the barnyard in the morning I am the one who bears the brunt of their postpartum anxiety. I remember one year the adults were so bold that I actually would wear a chainsaw helmet to keep the birds from grazing my face as they soared at me. An angry adult barn swallow will whip past your cheek from behind and chirp in your ear, an extremely startling experience. In front of you now, with perfect grace, they’ll glide into an upward, turning arc, level out, and then scream like a Stuka directly at your face. These small birds are fast, closing on you at up to twenty meters per second, so having three or four of them dive bombing you at six am can be an unnerving experience.
In their earliest fledge the juveniles sit on top of our root washing jets below their nest, just getting their wings. The adults are less protective now, and you can watch the young birds from up close. They are such a frowny species, so funny, so put-off looking. Also their song is really funny and equally sophomorish . If you listen closely to a barn swallow song, which is mostly a rapid, sometimes bubbly chatter, you’ll notice that it will end with a distinct fart note:
chink-chat-chink-chink-chat-chat-chink-chat-fart.
It’s quick, mostly people don’t notice it, but once you hear it you’ll never miss it again. Some times they really push that last note: chink-chat-farrrrrt.
Ha, ha, little pigs.
During the mating season I have the esteemed privilege to be a partner among the swallow’s hunting grounds. Mowing in particular, or mixing compost piles, stirs up all sorts of chaotic bug activity. Dragon flies that themselves hunt among the compost piles and fields become prey as I disorient them with my tractor bucket or brush hog. Whenever I spread compost or mulch in the summer, a compost yard hectic with dragonflies, the swallows snatch the big insects out of the sky like airborne vipers, fast, lethal, soaring around my open cabin like a pack of winged wolves (I love mixing metaphors).
Trying to describe for you the flight of a barn swallow is not really up to my poetic pay grade. Language in general, in regards to birds, always falls flat for me… too grand, or more often, too trite. Trying to capture birds with prose is like trying to photograph a sunset with an iPhone… you need someone with better equipment than I possess.
However there is variability in the way the birds move worth mentioning. Like I said, when they are mating, building nests, brooding, or protecting their young chicks, or hunting on the wing, they behave with different degrees of anxiety, courage, grace, beauty, and ruthlessness. This past August morning, which was crisp and bright, I saw a distinct style of flight that I only observe after they’ve reared their young in late summer. It’s an accomplished soaring, something I’d describe as joyful. The birds swayed and flushed around the tall weeds and short trees around my equipment yard, zipping and spinning. I can’t say if they were paying any attention to me, if they were hunting, or perhaps doing one last territorial districting flight in the barnyard. But the next day they were gone. The waning summer took my friends back on their southern journey. I think one winter I will have to go back to southern South America and see how the swallows get along in their warm, winter haunts. Without the need to nest or rear, maybe they enjoy the winter the same way I do, with a quiet satisfaction, a little less harried, and with plenty of joy on the wing.
*According to recent discoveries barn swallows, which traditionally were not thought to breed in their winter grounds in Central and South America, are now found to be raising young in Argentina. It sounds like these are distinct populations, many of the migrating birds still taking the winter months off before returning to North America to breed.