Introduction and fledgling swallows

July 22, 2012

Last November I moved to a riverhouse -- a floating home -- on Sauvie Island, on the Multnomah Channel of the Willamette River outside Portland, Oregon. It's just a quarter mile from the forest house where I'd lived for 23 years, but it is amazingly different and wondrous. I've been keeping journal notes and writing stories to friends about what I see and experience, and decided that I would become a blogger so that all that could be available in one place.

I'm a science, history and nature writer, but this blog will not be elegantly crafted pieces, just quick snippets of this life.

This first entry will focus on the fledgling swallows in the photo. We have four kinds of swallows in our area -- tree, violet-green, cliff and barn. For years at my other house I'd had violet-green swallows in special nesting boxes I put up for them. I put up such a box here but none nested. Instead, I got these visitors on the glider on my deck. I believe they are the birds that fledged a few days earlier from a mud nest at my friend's place three houseboats downriver.

This photo was taken on June 22nd and here's what I wrote in my journal:
"Four baby swallows perched on deck glider. Parents fly by -- they all open their mouths-- parents fly by and feed them. They are all chirping. One sat on top of one of the others for about 30 seconds. The ones on the end are getting fed more than the ones in the middle. I started watching them about 5pm. It started to rain; they all snuggled close to each other -- two facing one direction and two the other.
5:35. A fifth one arrived and then they all left. (maybe it was the parent advising them that dinner was over)
5:45. Four birds are back.
June 23rd. 8:45 am. The four baby swallows are huddled on the glider. It's rainy, rainy, rainy."

Last evening friends were here at dusk as swallows flitted all about us, swooping to snatch insects in the air and on the water surface. We had a long discussion about them, and then couldn't agree on which of our species of swallows build mud nests. Got out the "Birds of North America" book and couldn't tell. Got out the 1,100-page Audubon Bird Encyclopedia and saw that both barn swallows and cliff swallows build mud nests. Since the swallows in the photo don't have a forked tail (nor are blue/tree or violet green), then they must be cliff swallows. Next year I am going to build some platforms so they will nest at my place.

Below is a photo of a new crop of baby swallows in their mud nest at my neighbor's.