I live at the southernmost tip of Puget Sound, where I have a peek-a-boo view of Eld Inlet. For 35 years I’ve been getting to know the cycles of this landscape and its inhabitants. One of these cycles belongs to my favorite summer resident: the barn swallow.

Our house, known to many folks in the neighborhood as “the bird house,” is home this year to 17 pairs of barn swallows. They build their mud “half-basket” nests under the eaves on all sides of the house and garage. Each of these nests produces 3 to 5 babies, and most of them do it twice. That means it’s possible for our house to add as many as 170 barn swallows to the local population.

Photo by wileydoc, Pixabay

When the barn swallows first appear in early April, I watch them skim the greening pasture for emerging flies, midges, and mosquitos. Having survived the winter months, the insects take advantage of warmer temperatures and longer days to begin the next stage of their life cycle. Eggs hatch, larvae molt or pupate, and adults take wing to feed on nectar, plant juices and other insects before laying more eggs. One form transforms into another. The swallows time their arrival to take advantage of this increasing food source.

In May, I listen to the barn swallow’s courtship song, a liquid flow of warbles and twitters ending with a curious metallic grinding sound. I watch them mate on the telephone wire, the male fluttering above the female for a brief moment of contact before they both swirl off to feed. Soon the pairs will begin building new nests, or refurbishing old ones, under the eaves of our house and garage.

For three years, a pair of barn swallows has inhabited an unusual nest on the front porch light outside my kitchen window. The first year it was a modest little nest, a full bowl of mud braided with grasses anchored between the fixture and the porch wall. The next year the couple decided to add on, building the bowl up to twice its original height and embellishing it with white tail feathers from our leghorn rooster. Perhaps the birds decided to reduce the space between the porch ceiling and the top of the mud bowl, making it harder for predators to raid the nest. This year the swallows are using it again, adding new white rooster feathers that arc over the rim. And the interior of the bowl is lined with soft, warm feathers as well.

Below the nests, small mounds of white-brown squiggles quickly form on the ground around the house as the nestlings poop over the edge of the nest. When the winter rains come, the mounds dissolve and nitrogen and other nutrients are washed into the soil. The rhododendrons around my house take up those nutrients and host scale insects that will feed the Pacific wren and other birds finding shelter in the evergreen foliage.

I tape down diapers of plastic bags in an attempt to catch the droppings below the front porch nests and install small wooden shelves under the nests above the windows. But in spite of my efforts, at the end of the season I still have to scrub away the whitewash from the sides of the house. Which leads one to ask, “Why do you encourage these dirty birds?”

For one practical reason: They are eating hordes of insects that I find annoying like flies, mosquitos, and gnats. The swallows transform these insects into tiny white brown-speckled eggs. The eggs in turn become nestlings that require constant feeding. And soon the fledglings are devouring their own hefty share of insects as they glide and dive over the cow pies in the pasture. When the swallows depart at the end of summer, flies and mosquitos appear in our house.

The second front-porch brood has fledged and no longer comes back at night, nor do the parents. I climb a stepladder to peek inside and see the soft bowl of white and copper chicken feathers—and one wee swallow egg the shape of a raindrop. Something inside this little capsule wasn’t right. Perhaps it wasn’t fertilized and thus never developed. Or something in the cell division after fertilization went awry and the development abruptly stopped. I hold it gently in my hand, marveling and wondering.

For the Barn Swallow Class of 2020, it’s not the end—it’s the beginning of a grand adventure. Migration! Endless days of flying and feeding on their way to Central and South America, filling up on the greater variety of insects in the tropics. I wonder if they travel in the same group of one hundred or mingle and divide randomly. What predators must they avoid? Do they play the feather game along the way? When they get to their wintering grounds, the adults molt their body and flight feathers. THAT must take a lot of energy. Are they less active during this transformation? When the change in day length triggers the push to move again, do they make false starts? Do they make a direct flight or do they stop to rest and feed for a week or two along the way?

And this year brings other sobering questions. How many of the barn swallows made it through the fires in Oregon and California? Did they change course to avoid the flames and smoke? Were there enough insects available to sustain them? The cycles I take for granted are being impacted in increasingly obvious ways as weather patterns become unpredictable.

So many things to ponder in the deep, dark nights of December. Where are the swallows now? What’s beginning to emerge under the leaf litter, the end of last year’s foliage? The stinking carcasses of chum salmon in the creek down the road might look like the end of the salmon run, but eggs are nestled like precious jewels in the gravel—the Wheel of Life is turning. Soon the sun will rise a little earlier and set a little later. At least that cycle is unaltered. I’ll start thumbing through seed catalogs, and in a few short months I’ll scan the skies for those graceful little birds with inky blue wings. A new swallow season will begin.

Table of Contents, Issue #10, Winter 2020