The Bank Swallow 
lOI 
The barn swallow, as we have seen, chooses 
to nest upon the rafters inside the barn, but the 
eave swallow is content to stay outside under 
the shelter of a projecting roof. In such a place 
you find not one, but several or many mud 
tenements plastered in a row against the wall, 
for eave swallows are always remarkably so- 
ciable, even at the nesting season. A photo- 
graph of a colony I have seen shows one hundred 
and fifteen nests nearly all of which touch one 
another. 
Although so often noticed circling about 
barns, you 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 eave 
swallow is not the barn swallow, which it other- 
wise resembles. 
THE BANK SWALLOW 
Called also: Sand Martin; Sand Swallow 
Perhaps you have seen a sand bank some- 
where, probably near a river or pond, where 
the side of the bank was filled with holes as if 
a small cannon had been trained against it as 
a target. In and out of the holes fly the 
smallest of the swallows, with no lovely me- 
tallic blue or glistening buff in their dull plum- 
