08/05/2007

On the Wing

Seasons sway with the swallows

By Kay Charter
Local columnist

Read past On the Wing columns here

At sunup on the last morning of June, I was again walking up our drive for the newspaper. For any bird lover, nothing can beat daybreak at that time of year with its dawn chorus.

But on this particular bright, cool morning, something was definitely missing. Not the killdeer family, who continued to scream in unison every time they saw something (or someone) they did not trust, and not the still-territorial indigo buntings, eastern kingbirds and rose-breasted grosbeaks, all singing or calling from various corners of Charter Sanctuary.

What was notable for its absence was the cheerful chatter of tree swallows, which had finished nesting and departed.

It's always a bittersweet time for me, when the swallows leave. I love their aerial antics and their delightful calls — one could hardly call them songs — that fill the air over our meadows with an irresistible joie d'vivre every spring.

That morning, in spite of the fact that all of the rest of our nesting birds were still here, visible in their search of food for young, I suffered a pang of regret that these dear little birds were gone for another year.

Never mind that, in many ways, the best of summer was still ahead. Cherries would soon be ready for harvest; better than that, produce from my husband's garden was nearly ripe. What is better than plucking juicy tomatoes and eating them right from the vines, still warm from the sun's rays? Or having a meal of freshly picked sweet corn or small, tender redskin potatoes dripping in butter?

From early July through mid-September, I don't decide what to prepare for our evening meal until it is time to begin cooking and only then do I head to the garden to take what I need.

As for our birds, orioles and catbirds regularly carried mealworms from a dish on our kitchen deck back to their nests, while both white-breasted nuthatches and hairy woodpeckers were bringing young in to nearby branches to feed them pieces of peanuts. Grosbeaks and waxwings snatched fruit from a large serviceberry bush outside our living room window. The bluebirds nesting in a box just outside my office window busied themselves carrying insects to their young, and a pair of phoebes that had selected a ledge outside a window on the opposite wall in my office were doing the same.

There was our new pond, with calling green frogs and tiny turtles sunning themselves on the roots of the upturned tree we'd had the excavator drop into the center. And then there was our short grass prairie, with drifts of blooming milkweed scattered among the bright green shoots of little bluestem grass, thriving in its second year of growth.

I was surrounded by an abundance of natural wealth, embraced by the wildness I've devoted my life to protecting and preserving. The whole point of this place — this sanctuary for birds that are losing ground — is to see them return from the tropics, select mates and then breed successfully.

Tree swallows have done that in abundance, producing young from up to 25 nest boxes for each of the past 14 years. Even taking into consideration harsh years (such as this one, when we lost a fair number of adults to that horrid 10-day April storm), the results of these nestings add up to well over a thousand fledged individuals. That is an incredible success by any measure.

So why the long face and heavy heart? Was it because tree swallows are my favorite species and I just can't bear to have them leave? Certainly they are one of them. But they don't mean a bit more to me than the bobolinks, redstarts, orioles and the rest of the panoply of colorful birds that make Charter Sanctuary their home during the breeding season.

The problem may simply be that these engaging little birds are the first neotropical species to reappear in spring, bringing their joyful noise to our still-dead meadows. While that doesn't make them more special, it does make their absence much more noticeable.

Kay Charter is executive director of Saving Birds Thru Habitat, an organization that teaches people how to help migrating birds whose populations are declining