In Praise of the Barn Swallow

My favorite bird is the barn swallow. Though also the cliff swallow. I just didn’t know cliff swallows were living on the farm until a year or two ago. Before then, in ignorance, cliff and barn swallows were interchangeable, the same bird.

So, more accurately, they’re tied for first.

There are so many admirable birds on the farm—our natives but also the huge amounts of migratory birds thanks to the river and the Oxbow that move through here late winter and fall. The great blue heron wade in our fields at the tail end of floods from the Great Miami, fishing for the easy pickings of fish trapped unawares in a shallow pools as the river recedes. Kingfisher, pileated/downy/red-bellied woodpeckers, raucous crows, gold finches all fill our woods, passing in wing whirr and colorful flashes through the sunlit patches between the maples and sycamores. Raptors of all sizes abound—bald eagles, osprey, red-tailed hawks, barred owls, turkey buzzards, the tiny kestrel that hover, helicopter-like, hunting at the edge of the horse pastures. And spring and fall, sand hill cranes blow through by the hundreds, their otherworldly calls echoing through the river valley. They land in the gravel pit ponds one day and disappear the next.

All the winged creatures (also bats), make the farm a more interesting place and a healthier ecosystem as well. Nice for the campers. Nice for folks on horseback moving slowly over the acres here. Nice for my brother and his staff and friends at the bar who have all turned into huge birding nerds after downloading the Merlin app to their phones. But selfishly, best of all, nice for me—solidly entertaining while maintaining trails or baling hay or going on the daily dog run with my hound Grady.

And chief of all of those birds are the tiny cliff and barn swallows.

They nest in the horse barns, using hay, mud, and shed horse tail and mane hair to construct their nests each spring after returning from their winters in Brazil. They zoom in and out of the barns like tiny jets and rest in groups of ten to twelve at a time on the electric lines that stretch from barn to barn. In early summer, the juveniles pile up in lines along the electric fence lines of the pasture. I can drive right up to them in a noisy ATV and they stand their ground—too young to understand that I could be dangerous. I deliver them lectures about barn cats and hawks and humans and staying safe. Within a week or two, it’s sunk in, and they scatter when they see me coming.

But whenever I do grass farming work—haying, cutting pastures—swallows are my constant companions. As I work the fields, I kick up every flying insect in the grass, making the hunt for food, I imagine, delightfully easy. Within ten minutes of running a mower, tedder, baler in the wide open, I am surrounded by a swirling circle of swallows flying around me hoovering up all the bugs thrown into the air. I’m certain they’re ever on the lookout for us to get to work already, and likely know the sound of the engines of the equipment that provide them with a meal.

It may sound silly, but flushing insects for our swallows makes me feel connected to them, a part of the system that keeps them moving back and forth between us and South America year after year.

I am connected, too, to the turkey buzzards by the equipment that inadvertently kills small animals hiding in the hay we cut. They settle behind us in the windrows cleaning up the kills we’ve left behind. And we’re kept company by the their red naked heads bending low to rip and tear the rest of the afternoon. I like that connection less, but it’s mine regardless.

***

Things feel hard right now. Like bone-wearyingly hard.

Which is weird because the slide into fall on the farm is usually a relaxing one. All the pasture fence lines have been put back up and fixed for a few months now. Hay harvest is nearly finished. I get to drift a bit more towards willows and weaving. In the barns we get to work on building projects that are fun to do, but that we haven’t had the free time in our work days to get to. And there’s no rush. We can pick from a list of projects and work at them with no real sense of the urgency we feel about our summer work.

Barn swallows are my favorite bird and fall is my favorite season.

But it’s nevertheless hard this year. We’re in a drought. More small annoying infrastructure fixes have come up than usual. I have a mule now and I want to ride her and enjoy all of the hard work we put into clearing and maintaining miles of riding trails. Yet, it seems like something is always cropping up to distract us from the fun and rest we surely ought to have earned by September.

On top of that, though, is the state of the world and the country.

Whatever side of the political spectrum you’re on, I suspect you’re getting ground down and exhausted by the news every day. It’s an added weight that none of us need piled on top of our already complicated and busy lives. It feels a bit like the weeks and months after 9/11, when we all kept up with our daily chores and jobs and family obligations but there was a weight of fear and anxiety layered on top of everything we did.

Thinking back to that time, I also remember how beautiful it was in Chicago on the actual day. Fine weather—in the seventies, no humidity, blue skies filled with beautiful cumulus clouds hanging out over Lake Michigan. Everyone was sent home from work and school for fear of the Sears Tower being a target, and so, on a workday, the streets looked like any gorgeous weekend day filled with people pushing strollers, walking dogs, going for bike rides, eating in road-side, open air cafes.

I rode my bike to the lake and laid under a big tree, staring up into the branches, wavering between being numb and crying. But also, the thought crept in, while listening to bird song, and wind in the trees and the waves of the lake brushing up against retaining walls, that the natural world went on, uncaring, doing its thing regardless of the terrible things we humans did to one another.

There was some comfort in that then. And there still is today.

***

I’m sitting here in one of our small 4x4 side-by-sides in the hay field that runs the length of the horse pastures, the sky stretching out overhead blue on blue on blue. Not even a wisp of a cloud. No hint of rain to save us from the way so much of everything is slowly turning yellow, then brown.

I turn over the engine and start driving in slow looping circles on what feels like the last solidly green seven acres on our 300 acre farm. Within a few minutes, the first swallow shows up to careen tightly around me. A few minutes more and there are fifteen or more doing their flybys and sharp turns that feel somehow both expertly controlled and recklessly joyful. The deep blue iridescent blue and forked tail of a barn swallow arcs within centimeters of the creamy-back end and blunt tail of a cliff swallow. Near collision. But not. Not ever.

There’s no farm work here. I’m wasting fuel.

I’m here only for this—making a banquet for swallows and having the privilege to be caught in their cyclone of flight.

They’ll be heading south soon, but it’s okay. The girls and I have taught ourselves how to weave barn swallows out of willow. A simple project. Like a cave painting of a bird using sticks instead of red clay.

We usually decorate our central barn doors that can be seen from the road with willow stars and swirling curlicues made from cattail cordage. This year, we’ll be hanging up a flock of barn swallows spiraling across the old gray wood. Because we’ll miss them while it’s cold. Because they’re my favorite bird. Because it’s nice to make things with our hands in a group, chatting or not.

But also as a reminder that there is beauty all around us, natural beauty anyway, that is divorced from human concerns, our smallness, our violence, our fear and anxiety.

The world, as they say, does go on.