The Barn-Swallow {Hirundo erythwgaster) 

 By Alexander Wilson 



Length, seven inches, deeply forked tail. 



Range: Breeds throughout United States (except the South Atlantic 

 States and Gulf States) and most of Canada; winters in South America. 



In the United States there are but few persons who are not acquainted 

 with this gay, innocent and active little bird. Indeed the whole tribe are so 

 distinguished from the rest of small birds by their sweeping rapidity of flight, 

 their peculiar aerial evolutions of wing over our fields and rivers and through 

 our very streets from morning to night, that the light of Heaven itself, the 

 sky, the trees, or any other common objects of nature are not better known 

 than the Swallows. We welcome their first appearance with delight, as the 

 faithful harbingers and companions of flowery spring and ruddy summer; and 

 when after a long, frost-bound and boisterous winter, we hear it announced 

 that "the swallows are come," what a train of ideas are associated with the 

 simple tidings ! 



The wonderful activity displayed by these birds forms a striking con- 

 trast to the slow habits of most other animals. It may fairly be questioned 

 whether among the whole feathered tribes which Heaven has formed to adorn 

 this part of creation, there be any that, in the same space of time, pass over 

 an equal extent of surface with the Swallow. Let a person take his stand on 

 a fine summer evening by a new-mown field, meadow or river shore for a short 

 time, and, among the numerous individuals of this tribe that flit before him, 

 fix his eye on a particular one, and follow for a while all its circuitous laby- 

 rinths, its extensive sweeps, its sudden rapidly-reiterated zigzag excursions, 

 little inferior to the lightning itself, and then attempt by the powers of 

 mathematics to calculate the length of the various lines it describes. Alas"! 

 even his omnipotent fluxions would avail him little here, and he would soon 

 abandon the task in despair. 



Yet, that some definite conception may be formed of this extent, let us 

 suppose that this little bird flies in his usual way at the rate of one mile in a 

 minute, which, from the many experiments I have made, I believe to be within 

 the truth, and that he is so engaged for ten hours in every day, and further 

 that this active life is extended to ten years (many of our small birds being 

 known to live much longer even in a state of domestication). The amount of 

 all these, allowing three hundred and sixty-five days to a year, would give 

 us two million, one hundred and ninety thousand miles, upward of eighty- 

 seven times the circumference of the globe. 



The Barn-swallow arrives in parts of Pennsylvania from the south on 

 the last week in March or the first week in April, and passes on to the north 



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