The Barn Swallow 
127 
decrease; but there is a constant and real loss of Barn Swallows, accord- 
ing to reports from all parts of the country, chargeable to the English 
Sparrows. These little bandits seem to have a special fondness for 
despoiling the nests of Swallows of all kinds, tearing them to pieces — 
perhaps for the sake of the feathers and other good materials for Sparrow- 
use — and disturbing their owners until the harassed Swallows finally 
abandon the premises. This is an extensive evil; and it can be prevented 
only by our taking the trouble to protect our Swallows against their 
feathered enemies. Cats also catch many Swallows, Destructive 
snatching them out of the air as they skim close to ® u 1V 
the ground in pursuit of grass-moths and similar 
low-flying insects. Rats and mice devour their eggs and young to some 
extent. 
From about 1880 to 1890 tens of thousands of Barn Swallows were 
killed in order to use their wings, heads and tails for decorating women’s 
hats. During those years the agents of the millinery trade slaughtered 
them over large areas of their breeding territory. This is the bird, in 
fact, which aroused in the mind of George Bird Grinnell, then editor of 
Forest and Stream , such indignation at the waste of bird-life for millinery 
that he wrote a vigorous editorial in 1886 which immediately led to the 
founding of the first Audubon Society. 
In the Middle States the Barn Swallow comes soon after the first 
week in April, a time when the flying insects upon which it feeds may 
be expected to be plentiful. Its first appearance, as well as its last in 
autumn, is usually in the vicinity of water ; and, before pairing, the 
nightly roost of the birds is in the low bushes near some marsh-meadow. 
Four to six eggs are laid, white, speckled sparsely with pale red and 
brown. Two broods are usually reared in a season, the first nest being 
built in early May and the second in June ; and some- 
times even a third brood comes. The young are dull 
and brownish at first, like Bank Swallows, and the 
forked tail is not fully developed until a somewhat advanced growth 
is reached. 
At this season the food-hunting flight of the Barn Swallow is inces- 
sant, and, as the birds are of a sociable nature, they often go out in 
groups, when their happy twittering makes one of the sounds we should 
miss sadly were they to disappear altogether from our neighborhood. 
In addition to killing myriads of mosquitos and their kin, small, injurious 
moths, flies, beetles, and several species of winged ants are taken ; and 
this fact makes these birds, or should make them, very welcome about 
barns and stables. 
Everything concerning the life of a Barn Swallow is simple, inno- 
cent, and suggestive of the dawn of things, before wild nature had 
learned to protect itself against the wiles of man ; yet this Swallow is as 
quick of wit as of wing where the care of its young is concerned. 
I well remember the expedient resorted to by a pair of Swallows that 
had trouble in coaxing their belated nestlings to leave a rafter in our 
hay-loft. 
The brood was ready to fly one warm day in the early part of August, 
Eggs and 
Young 
