Delightfully Acrobatic Tree Swallows Nest in our Garden
Tree Swallows are nesting in a box we put up in our lower meadow. During the cool rainy days we had this past week, the male sat on the box keeping watch. We weren’t sure if they were committed to nesting there, but we were hopeful.
Once things warmed up, they got busy. All day long she appeared inside the box at the nest hole, a sign she was laying and then incubating the eggs. After sitting patiently for awhile, she would start to chirp quietly to let him know she’s waiting. He would then fly in seeming to offer her a tasty insect.
They come and go all day, sometimes exchanging places. They are foraging for bugs, their shiny iridescent blue plumage gleaming as they dart in and out of the nest hole so fast you miss it if you blink.
The Back Story
It all started when a friend of ours gave us a nest box for Black-capped Chickadees. Chickadees are one of our most common yard birds, so we thought it would be nice to offer them a cozy cavity for raising young. They showed no interest in the box. We kind of forgot about it
That would have been the end of the story, but in early April Eastern Bluebirds tried to squeeze themselves into the too small nest hole. It was painful to watch. Worried they wouldn’t find housing, we immediately set to work buying and installing a correctly-sized box for them in our lower backyard. Here’s what it looks like. The open, grassy habitat there is closer to the wide-open fields they prefer for nesting. We often heard the bluebirds’ mellow whistles, but we never saw them check out the box. We were bummed. We even tried to bribe them with mealworms.
The story then took an unexpected turn, with a third species entering the housing picture. A pair of Tree Swallows started checking out the box in late May. Unlike chickadees and bluebirds, we have never even seen Tree Swallows in the neighborhood. They like to forage for insects over ponds, and there is one about a mile down the road, so perhaps they spied our box while foraging there. Like bluebirds, they prefer to nest in open fields and often use bluebird boxes.
We went camping for a few weeks, leaving them to sort things out. When we returned they were nowhere to be seen. Bummer! The next day, however, we saw the male doing sentry duty on top of the box. It turns out the female was inside laying eggs, and now a week later is incubating. We hope all goes well and we will have some fledglings flying around the yard in about a month. So exciting!