Grand Forks Herald, ND – Jun 25, 2014
By Mike Jacobs, Publisher and Editor of the Herald
Birds face a lot of perils as they work to raise their young. This truth reached our home dramatically Saturday morning.
Suezette and I have undertaken a landscaping project that involves spreading lots of small stones. To make room for the pickup loaded with stones, we moved the car tight up against the garage door. One of the cats sensed an opportunity (This is how cats think) and got up on the hood, then leaped up to the eaves of the garage and brought down a swallow nest.
The nest belonged to a pair of cliff swallows, and they were particularly welcome. A small colony of cliff swallows nested on one of the outbuildings when we bought our place west of Gilby, N.D. We determined that the building was unsafe and took it down after the swallows had gone.
Every spring since, cliff swallows have visited our property scouting nest sites, but this is the first year they’ve actually settled down.
This pair of swallows was unusual for two reasons. First, it was alone. Usually, cliff swallows nest in colonies ranging from a dozen nests to several hundred nests. The birds didn’t build an original nest. Instead, they took over a nest built last year by barn swallows, then added their own characteristic architecture.
Barn swallows build nests that are open at the top. Cliff swallows build juglike nests with a single opening at the side.
The birds were a charming picture side by side in their nest, and they were remarkably tolerant of us. Neither took flight until we approached the nest quite closely.
All of these circumstances suggest that this is a young, inexperienced pair, probably in their first nesting year.
It’s not unusual for cliff swallows to scout new nesting sites. Often they build under bridges; more rarely, they choose the sides of buildings – often fairly high buildings such as hip-roofed barns.
It’s likely that there are more cliff swallows in the Red River Valley than any other kind of bird. Almost every rural bridge has a colony, and they nest under the big bridges across the Red River in Grand Forks and East Grand Forks.
Lots of people don’t welcome swallows, I know, and they can be messy. To me, this disadvantage is offset by the pleasure I get seeing and hearing them – and by the mosquitoes that they eat.
The adult birds survived Saturday’s assault, but the nest and their eggs were destroyed. This is a catastrophe for the birds, of course. They will probably try to rebuild. If they begin a completely new nest, this process will take more than a week. Their modifications to an existing nest took almost as long.
More likely, I think, these birds will rejoin a colony elsewhere, perhaps taking over an existing nest.
Or, following a biological imperative, the female may lay her eggs in another’s nests. This behavior has been observed in cliff swallows.
In either case, I’ll miss the swallows.
Swallows aren’t universally popular, I know. How to keep them from nesting above doors is one of the questions I’m most frequently asked. Two tricks may work. One is to hang strips of aluminum foil in the areas that you want to keep free of the birds. The other – one I don’t recommend – is to destroy the bird’s work each day until they become discouraged. This is extreme, I think – and please don’t demolish a nest that has eggs in it.
I wish I could have made my cat understand.
This week brought a question about another bird that’s often a nuisance, and I’m unable to offer any suggestions. The question is how to keep blackbirds away.
If there is a species more common here than the cliff swallow, it would surely be the red-winged blackbird. This is not the bird that most blackbird-haters have in mind, however. Instead, the culprit is the common grackle, a loud, aggressive and intrusive bird that not intimidates other birds but steals their food and sometimes robs their nests.
Jacobs is editor and publisher of the Herald.
