SWALLOWS: CLIFF SWALLOW 
463 
but building did not begin until June 9 (Wctmore).] At Tres Piedras young were 
still in the nest August 3, 1904 (Gaut). A few were seen August 6 about the Max¬ 
well reservoir, Colfax County 
(Kalmbach). 
In the fall, the larger part 
have left the State by the last 
of August; Costilla, 8,500 feet, 
August 25, 1904, and near Las 
Vegas, August 31, 1903 (Bailey). 
—W. W. Cooke. 
Nest. —A gourd or retort¬ 
shaped structure made of pellets 
of mud mixed with a few straws, 
lined with feathers; attached to 
cliffs or buildings. Eggs: 3 to 5, 
white, speckled or spotted with 
brown and lilac. 
Food. —Almost wholly in¬ 
sects, with a few spiders, the 
insects including leaf bugs, leaf 
hoppers, ants, wasps, golden 
green flesh flies, and some of our 
worst insect pests, as the boll 
weevil, alfalfa weevil, and the 
chinch bug, which destroys mil¬ 
lions of dollars worth of wheat. 
Thirty-five stomachs from Texas 
all contained cotton-boll weevils, 
averaging IS each, the majority 
containing nothing else; so that 
it may be conservatively esti¬ 
mated that Cliff Swallows, dur¬ 
ing the fall migration, would 
would destroy more than one million of these destructive insects in a week in one 
Texas County (Howell). 
General Habits. —Like the other swallows, the Cliff Swallow is 
gregarious, its colonies sometimes containing hundreds of birds. In 
New Mexico, in the region of eroded sandstone cliffs, under a projecting 
roof of rock we sometimes found a colony of nests set so close together 
that they gave the effect of a ceiling of adobe gourds. Near Santa Fe, 
Mr. Jensen has found a colony of about a hundred and fifty pairs on 
the sandstone cliffs near La Bajada Hill, and another large colony on 
a cliff facing the Rio Grande near the Cochiti Indian Pueblo. But 
while the Swallow still maintains its ancient custom of nesting on cliffs 
* in uninhabited country, in inhabited sections it nests commonly in rows 
under the eaves of barns. In the Santa Fe region Mr. Jensen has 
often found it nesting under the cornices of buildings. At Tres Piedras, 
where the people call it a “mud dauber/’ Mr. Gaut found it abundant 
