204 Birds of Buzzard's Roost 



short, unfeathered and weak ; feet very small and weak and of 

 very little use to the bird, except when perching. The adult 

 female differs from the male in having the belly and vent ru- 

 fous white, instead of light chestnut, and the exterior tail 

 feathers are shorter. 



The usual flight of this swallow is sixty miles an hour, but 

 it is said that it can fly at a speed of two miles a minute, or 

 one hundred and twenty miles an hour. It is a migrant, whose 

 range extends from Brazil north to Greenland and Alaska, 

 and east and west from the Atlantic to the Pacific Ocean. It 

 breeds from Mexico north throughout its northern range, and 

 winters in the tropics of both of the Americas. 



It is said that they mate for life, and when mated that 

 they return year after year to the same place to build their 

 nests. Soon after their return to the north they commence the 

 work of nest building. 



"The swallow is a mason, 



And underneath the eaves 

 He builds a nest and plasters it 



With mud and hay and leaves." 



Their bracket-like nest is fastened beneath the eaves or to 

 the sides of the rafters of a barn or other out-building or un- 

 der the arch of an old bridge, and is made in the form of an 

 inverted cone, with a slice cut off one side. At the 

 top it has a kind of shelf, on which the birds sit 

 occasionally, as is shown in the illustration. The shell 

 of the nest is made of pellets of mud mixed with hay, as 

 plasterers mix hair with mortar to make it less brittle; the 

 mud is about an inch thick and placed, as is seen in the illus- 

 tration, in regular layers. The inside of the nest is filled with 

 fine hay and leaves, well stuffed in, and covered with a hand- 

 ful of downy feathers, which usually overhang the nest. In 

 this nest are laid from four to six white eggs marked with 

 dots and blotches of reddish brown and purple. Incubation 

 lasts about thirteen days. Both birds assist in this and occupy 

 the nest at night until the young are hatched. Two broods 

 are reared in a season, the first in May and the second in July. 

 The young are distinguished from the old by the absence of 



