Barn Swallow

Common Backyard Birds

BARN SWALLOW
(Chelidon erythrogaster) (Hirundo rustica) Swallow family

About 7 inches in length, this distinguished swallow has a deeply forked tail. While Barn Swallows are known to  breed throughout the United States and Canada, they winter in South America.

This is one of the most familiar farm birds and a great insect destroyer, seeking prey from daylight to dark on tireless wings. Its favorite nesting site was barn rafters, upon which it stuck mud baskets to hold its eggs. But modern barns are fewer and so tightly constructed that swallows cannot gain entrance, and in much of this country, they have turned to boat docks, commercial buildings, summer homes, and the out buildings of rural suburbs to keep the species going. Like other rural birds, they have to adjust to changing land-use patterns.

Any one who attempts to describe the coloring of a bird's plumage knows how inadequate words are to convey a just idea of the delicacy, richness, and brilliancy of the living tints. But, happily, the beautiful barn swallow is too familiar to need description. Wheeling about our barns and houses, skimming over the fields, its bright sides flashing in the sunlight, playing "cross tag" with its friends at evening, when the insects, too, are on the wing, gyrating, darting, and gliding through the air, it is no more possible to adequately describe the exquisite grace of a swallow's flight than the glistening buff of its breast.

The Barn Swallow is a typical bird of the air, as an oriole is of the trees and a sparrow of the ground. Though the barn swallow may often be seen perching on a telegraph wire, suddenly it darts off as if it had received a shock of electricity, and we see the bird in its true element.

While this swallow is peculiarly American, it is often confounded with its European cousin Hirundo rustica in noted ornithologies.

Up in the rafters of the barn, or in the arch of an old bridge that spans a stream, these swallows build their bracket-like nests of clay or mud pellets intermixed with straw. Here the noisy little broods pick their way out of the white eggs curiously spotted with brown and lilac that were all too familiar in the marauding days of our childhood.

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