'The pioneer that carries the range a little further for- 

 ward starts from a base where it has associated with 

 companions and found food plentiful ; and when the im- 

 pulse to live in society again asserts itself, it not only 

 repeats its former experience but hands on the habit 

 thus acquired to those of the next generation that hap- 

 pen to accompany it." Eliot Howard (1920) 



17 



Building New Traditions 



To the Mission San Juan Capistrano, in California, 

 come Cliff Swallows each March, returning to build their gourdlike nests 

 under the Mission's eaves. The pastor, the Reverend Vincent Lloyd-Russell, 

 wrote me that the pioneer swallows first took residence on the buildings in 

 1776. Originally, the Cliff or Eave Swallow was confined in its nesting to 

 natural features of the land such as cliffs and overhanging walls. With the 

 coming of civilization, the structures of man offered ideal nesting situations ; 

 barns and other buildings were quickly accepted so that, as Bent (1942: 

 465) points out, the swallows "multiplied and spread from place to place 

 where they were never seen before." Far and wide over the land they 

 claimed new homes, deep over the prairies, far into the woodlands, miles 

 beyond their pristine nesting range. Lewis ( 1939a ) tells of a Nova Scotia 

 farmer who dates the history of a barnside colony back "ninety or a hundred 

 years," and he mentions another colony with a history going back to at least 

 sixty years. Grinnell (1937) believed that the pioneers were yearlings; and 

 in the colony starting on the Life Sciences Building, in Berkeley, California, 

 there was a span of six years between the completion of the building and 

 the establishment of the first swallow nests thereon. At Assessippi, Mani- 

 toba, however, Thompson (1891:608) noted that "although the carpenters 

 have scarcely finished the new mill, and hotel, over three hundred pairs of 

 Cliff Swallows have begun to build under the eaves." Buss (1942) traced 

 the history of a Wisconsin Cliff Swallow colony which started with one 

 nest on the barn of Cory Bodeman in 1904; the birds returned each year in 

 increasing numbers, until by 1942 there were 2,015 nests. 



227 



