A series of twittering notes serve as the song of the barn swallow. In southern Minnesota, we enjoy their musical chattering beginning about mid-April when they return from South America. We, too, can ...

Barn swallows have returned in full force, sometimes seeming to completely take over the barn and ranch. Uncertain when the unique birds started arriving this spring or when they left last year. When ...

Here is a typical conversation that I have with fellow birders when I’m trying to bird for swallows. “There’s a swallow. There it goes. Here it comes. I wish it would perch someplace.” Swallows fly a ...

Greensville resident Glenn Meldrum is no longer flying solo on his bid to build a nesting shed for barn swallows at nearby Johnson Tew Park and is now readying to land the project. He says efforts to ...

Barn swallows, seen here, can be distinguished from cliff swallows by their forked tails. Michele Roest Special to The Cambrian The swallows are back in town! One of the many joyful sights this time ...

Summer is swallow season. Spring migration can in some ways seem like a less-dramatic affair than California’s fall migration of ducks and shorebirds, with a relatively subtle arrival of songbirds, ...

Claim to fame: Thanks to the abundance of barns, old silos, bridges and other human-built structures, barn swallows have become frequent sights in Missouri and elsewhere across much of the United ...

For hundreds of years, barn swallows have signaled the coming of spring. In many cultures, it is considered good luck to have barn swallows build nests on a person’s property. Artifacts depicting barn ...

May is one of my favorite months of the year. Every walk outside is an adventure with something new to discover. One returning visitor excites me more than any other I see: barn swallows. They are ...

Cliff swallows first caught my attention this year when I saw them nesting under a bridge in The Woodlands. In summers past, the bridge on Lake Woodlands Drive was a great place to see nesting barn ...

I attended the annual "Purple Martins 101" program in July at Cantigny Golf in Wheaton, conducted by Ray Feld, a devoted Cantigny volunteer. Feld monitors and maintains the busy purple martin colony ...

Different hypotheses stress the importance of natural or sexual selection to explain the evolution and maintenance of long outermost tail feathers in the barn swallow (Hirundo rustica). Since energy ...