THE SWALLOWS 93 



before a sufficient number of pellets are worked into the 

 deep mud walls of the ample nursery. Usually grass is 

 mixed with the mud, but some swallows make their bricks 

 without straw. A lining of fine hay and plenty of feathers 

 from the chicken yard seem to be essential for their com- 

 fort, which is a pity, because almost always chicken feath- 

 ers are infested with lice, and lice kill more young birds 

 than we like to think about. When there is a nestful of 

 fledglings to feed, sticky little pellets of insects, caught on 

 the wing, are carried to them by both parents from day- 

 light to dusk. 



The Cliff or Eaves Swallow 



The barn swallow, as we have seen, chooses to nest upon 

 the rafters inside the bam, but the eaves swallow is content 

 to stay outside under the shelter of a projecting roof. 

 Before men built barns on this continent, the nest was 

 cemented to the face of a chff and in some regions still the 

 bird is known as the cliff swallow. In such a place you 

 find not one, but several or many queer mud tenements 

 plastered in a row against the wall, for eaves swallows are 

 always remarkably sociable, even at the nesting season. 

 A photograph of a colony in Ohio shows one hundred and 

 fifteen nests nearly all of which touch one another. The 

 entrance to the flask-shaped nest is long drawn out and 

 small. 



Although so often noticed circling about outbuildings on 

 the farm, one may know by the rusty patch on the lower 

 part of his steel-blue back, the crescent-shaped white mark 

 on his forehead, and the notched, not deeply forked tail, 

 that the eaves swallow is not the barn swallow, which it 

 otherwise resembles. 



