Swallow Song: The Tree Swallow Migration

I spend many of my summer evenings on my porch with a glass of wine.  After I built my house, I  began a ten-year project of planting trees and shrubs, and now, 35 years later, all have come to fruition. My two acres is largely wooded, home to deer, an occasional rabbit,  and more birds than I can count. One of them, a tree swallow, lives with her mate and family in the bird house I built and installed on the fence that surrounds my garden.

She’s a drab little creature, and owns nothing like the spectacular blue-green iridescence that marks her peacock of a husband. Instead, her back and wings are a muted brown, but, like all tree swallows, she wears the same starkly delineated mask that divides her handsome face: brown above, a soft white below. On this evening, she sits in the circular opening in her house, watching.

I can’t help but think she likes what she sees. While her mate performs impossible aerobatics above her head in search of  insects, she, like me, sits comfortably on her tiny porch and gazes at all before her: the trees, my small home, the flowers in my yard. Sometimes I would swear she’s watching me. But then, as if that moment of interspecies connection embarrasses her, her mate arrives, and in a twinkling she’s out of her home and rising up into the air, circling ‘round a beam of sunlight, soaring and diving far above earth in an impossible aerial ballet.  

Hers will be a brief, difficult life. Very soon, she’ll leave her  garden home and begin the long, dangerous migration to Mexico, where she’ll spend the winter. It is quite possible she won’t survive to return to it the following spring, which makes her few brief months with me all the more precious.

And so it is thus. Two days later, when I return, her house is empty. Sometime the preceding day, she found a beam of sunlight and rode it into the sky, up and up, into the clouds and the wind that took her away from me. That evening, two swallows returned to soar overhead, both males, their iridescent colors flashing in the sun, taking one last look to carry them south. But she was already on her way.

I wish her a safe journey. If tiny birds own that ineffable capacity, and I think they do, then I hope her days are filled with the spark of wonder she brought to my porch. 

I await her return.