Hebrides Bird Sightings: Barn Swallow

Barn Swallow (Swallow)

Hirundo rustica
Gaelic: Gobhan gaoithe

Photography © Andy l
Isle of Lewis - Outer Hebrides (Western Isles)
Early August, 2007

 

Our Swallow photographs:

barn swallow	red-rumped swallow	red-rumped swallow

 

Uncommon migrant breeder, Scarce passage visitor

• Barn Swallow
• AKA: Swallow,swalla
• Hirundo rustica, Gaelic: Gobhan gaoithe
• Western Isles (Mar - Oct) Uncommon migrant breeder, Scarce passage visitor
• UK 726,000 pairs (Summer) (Declining) AMBER LIST BTO
• Breeds: Originally cave-nester: Europe, Asia, North America
• Winters: South Africa, North Australia, South America
• Habitat: Open country usually near water: farm pasture & buildings, villages, reedbeds
• Diet: Aerial feeder: flying insects (flies mostly)
• Small bird: dark glossy-blue back, red throat & forehead, pale below, long (forked) tail streamers
• Very agile in flight - spends majority of life on the wing.
• Average age 3yrs, max recorded 11ys 1mth
• Listen to a barn swallow twittering (RSPB site)
• Similar birds: house martin, sand martin (squarer tails), swift (forked tails)
  

Within the sub-family Hirundiniae, the name "martin" usually refers to the squarer-tailed species, and the name "swallow" to the more fork-tailed species.There is no scientific distinction between these martins and swallows.

Female swallows choose the males with the most symmetric tails tails to mate with.

Aristole believed that swallows spent winter in the bottom of ponds. This was proven to not be the case by means of tying small strips of rag to a swallow's legs. The rags had a water-soluble dye, when the bird returned in the spring the strips of rag still had colour proving conclusively that swallows do not spend winter in the bottom of ponds.

Swallows winter in Africa and return to the Western Isles to breed each summer. Some arrive in March, but the majority do not arrive until April when there is plenty of food (flying insects). This is where the expression "One swallow doesn't make a summer" comes from.

Swallows flying high foretells good weather. When bad weather approaches atmospheric pressure drops, and this makes flying insects fly lower, so the swallows fly lower to catch them.

To have swallows nesting on one's land was thought to bring good luck. It was thought bad luck to kill them, and that it would lead to bloody milk, or no milk at all, and that hens would stop laying.

One of the reasons people would have risked the bad luck incured in killing a swallow was that there was a belief that illness could be cured by treating it with something that resembled the illness in some way. Swallows twittered so it was believed they could be used to treat epilepsy and stuttering. This involved eating the bird. (They are now a species protected by law).

Swallows originally nested in caves, now they often nest and fly about catching insects, in dark places like sheds and barns (hence the name barn swallow). This led to the belief that there was a small stone in a swallows nest that would cure blindness (the swallow stone).

 

 

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