AT WORK AND PLAY 219 



Very few birds have such a long and continuous 

 song season. 



The tree swallow is far inferior in voice to 

 his cousin the barn swallow. In fact, it is the 

 common belief that he has no song, and there 

 would be full excuse for the belief. Such, how- 

 ever, is not the fact. He is our earliest bird to 

 regularly welcome the dawn by song, even an- 

 ticipating the robin. The tree swallows' song, 

 for such it must be called, is a rather monotonous 

 and rather labored repetition of rolling or war- 

 bling notes. Every third or fourth is sharper and 

 shorter, and at times the notes may possibly be 

 called melodious. Its association, however, makes 

 it a pleasing song especially when the notes 

 shower down from a multitude of throats in the 

 dim light of dawn. 



This last season a pair of tree swallows reared 

 a brood of young in a nesting box on the outside 

 of a porch on my Ipswich house, and a pair of 

 barn swallows nested and successfully reared 

 five young on top of a pillar under the same porch, 

 so that I was able to observe and compare the 

 habits of these two species. I have no intention 



