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J.A. Harrison
ADU, UCT, Rondebosch, 7701
While scanning old issues of Ostrich, I was struck by the photograph on the next page which shows a large colony of South African Cliff Swallow Hirundo spilodera nests on the walls of a building. I had never come across this type of nest site in this species before, and the fact that it was a man-made structure, but different to the culverts and bridges normally used, pricked my interest. The structure is an old mill building on the farm Wheatlands in the Graaff- Reinet district and it is reported to have been colonized continuously from 1896 to the year of writing, 1940 (Taylor 1942). Further investigation led me to an article by none other than Austin Roberts (1939), who gave the following account of cliff swallows nesting on buildings:
‘By far the commonest of the Swallows in the Union is the Cliff Swallow, which formerly nested in large communities under overhanging rocks or earth banks on rivers, but had found the eaves of buildings, bridges, railway water tanks and the like so much suited to it that it has increased enormously in numbers in recent years. In the early ‘nineties (That’s the 1890s! – Ed.) it nested in great numbers under the eaves of the ‘Gereformeerde’ church at Potchefstroom and also on some farm houses in the neighbourhood. More recently a great controversy raged in the local newspaper, owing to the local fire brigade having been used to turn the hoses on the nests to wash them away! The church community at Strydenburg, C.P., solved the problem of keeping away these Swallows from building under the eaves of the church and causing much trouble by the mess they made, by erecting fine wirenetting wherever they were likely to build their nests. Such favoured nesting sites are not confined to churches and large public buildings, but also private residences in towns in many cases – if they are tolerated.’
Read more about 12. Nest site choice in the South African Cliff Swallow …