276 THE BARN SWALLOW. 
defection is unquestionably due to the presence of the English Sparrows; and 
the unlucky farmer now has to support a gibbering swarm of grain-eating 
birds, where before he enjoyed the gratuitous services of a graceful host of 
insect-destroyers. 
ING eet 
BARN SWALLOW. 
A. O. U. No. 613. Hirundo erythrogaster Bodd. 
Description.—Adult: Above lustrous steel-blue; in front an imperfect col- 
lar of the same hue; forehead chestnut; lores black; throat and breast rufous; 
the remaining under parts, including lining of wings, more or less tinged with 
the same, according to age and season; wings and tail blackish, with purplish 
or greenish reflections; tail deeply forked, the outer pair of feathers being from 
one to two inches longer, and the rest graduated; white blotches on inner webs 
(except on middle pair) follow the bifurcation. Jimmature: Forehead and 
throat paler; duller or brownish above; lateral tail-feathers not so long. Length 
about 7.00 (177.8); wing 4.75 (120.6); tail 3.00-4.50 (76.2-114.3); bill from 
nostril .24 (6.1). 
Recognition Marks.—Aerial habit ; rufous of throat and under parts; forked 
tail; nest inside the barn. 
Nest, a neat bracket or half-bowl of mud, luxuriously lined with grass and 
feathers, and cemented to a beam of barn or bridge. Eggs, 3-6, of variable shape, 
—oval or elongated ; white or pinkish white and spotted with cinnamon or umber. 
IM WAS 70) 2S AG) (IO). Se i1,))- 
General Range.—North America at large. Perhaps the most widely and 
generally distributed of any American bird. Winters in Central and South 
America. 
Range in Ohio.—Of universal distribution. Not so plentiful as formerly. 
IT takes six sorts of Swallows to make an Ohio summer, but we call that 
day spring when the pleasant twitterings of the Barn Swallows are to be heard 
in the land. The airy voyageurs have come many a league this morning, but 
they have time to peep into the old nests, and to make the empty rafters ring 
once or twice with their merry fisic, tisic, before they are out again to skim 
the meadows for an early breakfast. The very poetry of motion is theirs as 
they ply up and down above the clover tops, or rise at a thought to take an 
insect high in the air. See them, too, above the village horse-pond, skurrying 
after the nimble flies, now dipping into the water and just parting its surface, 
and now steeple lengths aloft, floating and fleeing in “higher plane curves” of 
flight. Surely all Swallows are graceful, but he of the forked tail is unsur- 
passed. 
