The Return of the Tree Swallows

After a warm and sunny start to this month, April showers have become relentless. The migrants that arrive early in Spring are scratching for food, especially the swallows. Every day a visit to any pond or lake will feature hundreds of them patrolling the waters, as patient and persistent as the fishermen in their boats who sometimes share the scene.

These little birds of the air buzz around the boats continuously, swooping low to the surface, then rising up to perform a sudden twist or even a sideward somersault. Their wings beat silently and endlessly, carrying the birds around and around like blind marathon runners, forever failing to reach the finish line.

Is this the mass suicide that happens to lemmings, plunging headlong ahead until they fall exhausted into the sea? When does the energy in these mighty mites run out, or do they possess some secret source to replenish their tank on the fly? It is no secret, because here above the waters is the only flying fuel there is on a cold, rainy April day.

Myriads of small, nearly invisible insects hatch from the surface and swarm around, searching for food themselves, but are instead fodder for the swallows. The acrobatics the birds perform are only the little maneuvers they must do to catch the unseen bugs in their wide-open bills. It is airborne dining at its best.

Most of these birds are tree swallows, and their white bellies shine even in the gray gloom as they bank and swerve not far off shore. Their iridescent backs flash steely blue with each turn, not the deep sky blue of a bluebird, with which the tree swallow is sometimes confused.

There are five species of swallows that breed across the entire content, from ocean to ocean. Four are named after their nesting preference, tree, bank, barn, and cliff (the swallows of San Juan Capistrano). The fifth is the rough-winged, which could have easily been given the name bridge swallow.

Sometimes these masterful fliers do land, but rarely on trees. Usually, they line up on electric wires that happen to be near a good feeding ground. Often, they fill three or four wires from pole to pole, sitting shoulder to shoulder, with just enough room to preen their feathers into place, ready for the next take-off.

A few days ago there was a flock of fifty tree swallows in a tight swarm just off-shore. They came in toward me and began to land in the branches of a maple tree that reached out over the water. Tree swallows alighting in a tree, it was a rare sight indeed. With them was one swallow with a longer tail and a chestnut-colored throat, a barn swallow.

As they settled down, side by side they chattered to each other with liquid musical notes that seemed like friendly and gentle banter. They seemed as cheery as when, on a warm sunny day, they circle over a beaver pond where there are nesting holes in the rotting snags, or a field where there are nesting boxes.

Six or eight birds will visit each home site in turn, two landing and the rest circling and twittering excitedly. Each couple gets plenty of help shopping for their single-family home, which in the end are probably assigned according to rank and seniority. But with such cold wet weather, it is not very long before they all retreat to the communal kitchen of a larger, gnat infested pond.

The swallows have a cousin, the purple martin, who favors the even closer habitation of an apartment building. Almost 100 years ago, in May of 1903, there was a prolonged cold wet spell of storms that killed all the martins who then lived in New England. There just was not enough food for them anywhere.

Since then, martins from the south have moved slowly north to a few places on the coast in Connecticut and Massachusetts. I always look for a stray martin with the flocks of swallows, and there was a report of two in Northampton during the height of the last rainstorm.

Let the sun shine soon and breed more gnats for swallows and martins alike. They have done nothing to deserve being thrown into the sea, hungry and tired.