Bird Notes
Guest Contributor Dennis Forsyth
You might think that my mother would have known better. After all she grew up on a farm in Saskatchewan and certainly was perfectly aware of the prolific bird life all around her. She must have seen them living out their lives. Still, one of her favourite expressions when the complexities of her life as a single mother raising two rambunctious sons got to seem overwhelming was, “Oh, to be as free as a bird.’
“As free as a bird”
Whoever coined that phrase never spent time observing birds. If the past ten or twelve years, during which I have spent a lot of time closely observing my feathered friends, have taught me anything, it is that most birds are almost never free of the nearly endless work required simply to survive. And then, every year of their lives, they are faced with the herculean labour of creating a new generation.
This year it is my resident family of Violet-green Swallows who are earning my admiration. We have had Violet-greens here every year for the past decade or more. Until this year a pair has always taken the pent-house apartment, which consists of a nest box mounted under the uppermost eave on the south side of the house. That puts it about twenty-five feet up and it is ideal for them being completely shaded during the hottest part of the day and virtually inaccessible to any potential predator. Because our lot is fairly compact and because this particular species is more territorial than most other swallows, we never have more than one pair nesting here so all of my photographic efforts with these birds have been long-range ones involving tripods and big, cumbersome lenses.
This year something went awry and a pair of chickadees, who usually inhabit another much lower box mounted on a tall fence post, got to the pent-house first and were in full possession before the swallows got around to looking at real estate. To my surprise, and considerable delight, the swallows simply shrugged and moved down to the former chickadee house near our south fence which is only about ten or eleven feet off the ground and easy to approach. A photographer’s dream. Great lighting through most of the day, easily accessible to a mounted camera with a remote shutter release and a chance to use short, fast lenses. And so, this spring and early summer I spent an inordinate amount of hard, labourious work, sitting in a lawn chair, in the shade, watching swallows raise a family while Marilyn gets to enjoy herself with garden chores.
I can report that raising a family of swallows is not a walk in the park. Beginning in mid-May the pair spent days hauling nesting material to the box. While the sexes are quite similar, there are enough differences to make it possible to distinguish males from females, and I soon could tell them apart from nearly any distance. Perhaps unsurprisingly to the women among my readers it soon became clear that this particular male lacked any sense of the possible or even probable when it came to furnishing a house. He repeatedly brought huge goose wing feathers, large sticks, enormous chunks of tangled twine, none of which would fit through the entrance hole and were simply dropped to form a trash pile on the ground. His mate in the mean time simply worked steadily away and within a few days apparently the place was furnished and she disappeared inside for extended periods. Laying eggs and brooding is a lot of work.
Her mate was, however, willing to bring her the occasional
tasty bug and she herself made three or four feeding flights each day. In this species both parents share in the raising of babies, which is not true for a lot of other birds.
Sometime in the second week of June the eggs had obviously hatched and then the real work began. Feeding a hungry brood is an incredible amount of work. Both adults begin before dawn each day and are pretty much on the wing until dark. In mid-June this means sixteen, seventeen or eighteen hour days. I tried to keep notes on the number of trips made but it becomes very difficult. For one thing, I can’t sit there myself for more than a few hours at a time. And, the frequency of trips varies considerably. I assume that the main controlling factor is the availability of insects. Sometimes the air is thick with them and then both adults might be back at the nest every six to ten minutes. At other times, there seems to be a scarcity and then they slow down to perhaps once every thirty or forty minutes. Type of insect also matters. Sometimes they are capturing large bugs and arrive at the box with legs and wings sticking out all around their bills. At other times they are foraging among swarms of tiny insects which they capture by simply flying through the swarm with mouth agape. When they have managed a load it’s time to return to stuff one of the babies.
Although I am sure that they do take the occasional rest break, these are infrequent and short. Because their preferred hunting ground is just across the road above the neighbour’s hayfield, I can usually watch them weaving their intricate flight paths as they search out their prey. Sometimes these hunting flights seem endless as I wait with shutter release finger poised. While this is only an informed guess, I think that each of the adults average around a hundred trips each day. That might work out to between forty and sixty kilometers of flying.
For the first week or two the feeding requires the adult to enter the box. Every second or third trip the female will leave the box carrying a fecal sac which she adds on to a personal art project she is creating on East Road. I’m not sure if this has anything to do with the ‘Y’ chromosome, but the male seems singularly uninterested in this kind of janitorial work.
Soon enough the babies are feathered and grown enough to begin to stick heads out of the box, and now the parents begin to feed them pretty much on the fly. While the adult may cling to the side of the box for a second or two, that is really all it takes to cram another bug down that insatiable maw. It looks painful as the adult actually stuffs it head into the baby’s throat right up to the eyes.
I’m going to have to figure out a way to see inside the box next year. One thing I want to know is how the chicks determine whose turn it is at the hole, since they all must be fed and obviously there is a protocol involved for the steady rotation.
Finally, after weeks of this, the first chick launches itself on June 28 followed next day by three more. That isn’t the end of work though. Like modern university grads, these kids keep coming back. For the next four days the babies keep returning to the box, sticking their heads out, and the parents keep hauling food. Now, on July 1, the nest box seems abandoned and the young swallows have moved out for good.
So now, at last, it must be time for mom and dad to become “free as birds”, right? Wrong, what it is time for, is to have a very brief second courtship, tidy up the old nest, lay another clutch and start the whole process one more time. Like many species of small birds swallows more often than not raise two broods each year. At least my mother had enough sense not to do that.
This article was first published in the August ‘Flagstone‘
