THE EAVES-SWALLOW: HOW SHE CAME AND 

 BUILT HER NEST. 



YOUR great-grandfather probably never saw an eaves- 

 swallow until he was a man grown. As you pass the barn 

 and the mother swallow puts out her head and twitters at 

 you, as friendly as a kitten, showing the forks of the light 

 crescent above her beady eyes, you cannot believe that this 

 social little creature was not here to make friends with the 

 Pilgrims when they landed. Yet men now living probably 

 saw the ' eaves-swallow arrive from the West. 



We have noticed that the eaves-swallow loves open, sunny 

 places, overhanging cliffs, and good, sticky mud. Now a 

 hundred years ago the whole of this country west to Ohio 

 was a thickly wooded country but little broken by clearings, 

 and with no extensive natural meadows. The clay banks were 

 covered by forests j the cliffs, of which there were indeed 

 enough, were under the shadow of great trees, and the whole 

 aspect of it to a bird looking down from a height must have 

 been dark, green, and gloomy, quite unlike the warm sunshine 

 over the Western prairies. There great rivers flowed through 

 channels cut in lofty cliffs, -and receding with the summer 

 heat, left beds of mud for the swallows to work on. Here 

 there was nothing to attract a lover of wide space and sunny 

 plains. So the eaves-swallows from times unrecorded fluttered 

 and digged in the mud banks of the West and plastered their 

 nests against the cliffs above. There they were first seen by 

 naturalists ; by Forster, who gave the first description of them 

 in 1772 ; by Audubon, who notes them in 1815 at Henderson, 



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