Remember the simple little song that “the swallow flies to visit us with a spring”? These words are dedicated to the migratory bird of the order of passerines, whose appearance marks for us the end of the cold weather and the onset of steady heat. In scientific terms, Hirundo rustica, and in Russian a killer whale, or a village swallow, is a bird loved by the people. Previously, the farmer began to sow spring, only after waiting for the arrival of these twitterers. According to the flight of the swallows, rain or bucket (clear weather) was predicted, and no one was allowed to ruin their nests.
Barn Swallow It has too characteristic habits and appearance to confuse it with other species: swifts, shores, funnels and city swallows. For nests, she chooses low, one- or two-story buildings. The rural resident especially likes wooden houses with overhanging cornices. Funnels and shorelines choose high river banks for nesting, hollowing shallow minks in sand or clay, and swifts and city swallows are not afraid of heights, sculpting their houses over the balconies of multi-storey buildings. These last fly for prey very high, going down to the ground only in the evening or in the rain, while rural women fly low. The barn swallow, the photo of which you see in the article, has an elongated black trunk with a forked tail. Its characteristic feature is a reddish head and neck, as well as a white breast, cut in half by a black stripe.
This is a
migratory bird, although sedentary flocks are sometimes found in the Mediterranean. The range of their nesting and wintering is huge: from the
far north of Eurasia and North America to South America, Hindustan, Indochina, the Malay Archipelago, New Guinea, South Africa. Giving the bird strong wings, nature also endowed it with rather weak legs, so the village swallow
rarely sits on the ground. They even drink on the fly, beating water with their beaks. In the morning, when the water is warmer than air, the birds do not deny themselves water procedures using shallows or puddles.
One can only guess where the barn swallow settled in those distant times when people had not yet learned how to build houses. Now this bird has firmly entered our life and has become a synanthropic species. She sculpts her houses of clay and her own saliva, cleverly mixing horse hair, straw, grass and feathers into this cementing mortar. Inside the nest, both parents are covered with soft feathers. The female lays from 4 to 8 white with speckled eggs. Both naked and defenseless chicks are looked after by both mother and father. To feed the yellow-green horde, they make about 400 summers a day! But they also need to eat more than they weigh, because such a rapid flight requires a lot of energy.
However, unlike the swifts and their urban sisters, the barn swallow likes to sit and gossip. For friendly rural gatherings, birds choose wires. In their opinion, a person only then erects houses so that there is somewhere to stick a nest, and pulls wires only so that the flock has where to sway and spend an hour or two on a hot afternoon. The solidarity of these birds can serve as an example to everyone: if a predator appears near a nest, parents call neighbors with an alarming twitter: soon a huge flock is gathering, which easily plows away from the chicks and the magpie, cat and even hawk.