Comments on: Baby swallows

By: Troy Curtis Jr

Troy Curtis Jr — Tue, 10 Jul 2007 11:33:28 +0000

What do you know, like many others, I too have a Swallow nest. This nest is just to the side of our front door so it can be a pretty big mess! A while back we noticed several eggshells littering the ground under the nest and were very happy we were playing host to some baby birds. However, a week later (or more, I don’t really remember) we found 4 little dead baby birds . It was quite sad. The swallow couple stuck around and I just noticed a week or two ago we found a couple more little egg shells! I guess they’re having another set. Which is great because the only reason we are content to let them nest their was for the sake of the little guys!

By: Sergeant Zim

Sergeant Zim — Mon, 09 Jul 2007 13:40:38 +0000

Gary, the issue of hummingbirds overwintering in the wrong place might be due to GW, or it might be due to human intervention. I lived in Santa Cruz, CA in the 80’s, and I recall several PSA’s from the local TV and radio stations, asking people to bring in their hummingbird feeders in the Fall. Local biologists were concerned that if food was plentiful during the time that the hummers should have been packing the car for the long trip, they might decide not to go at all, thus disrupting the mating and endangering the species.

By: beeb

beeb — Mon, 09 Jul 2007 12:32:13 +0000

I know that this isn’t about swallows but Eastern Phoebes. They are also insect eaters like swallows. The Phoebes don’t attack anybody so they were welcome guests and they eat a lot of deer and horse flies. The problem I found with these little critters is that they ate some kind of insect, tick or mite that reproduced in their fecal material that happened to rest under our deck. My first encounter was leaning against the deck rail and feeling little red pests crawling on my arm. They were smaller than a small flake of pepper and died easily as I squashed them on my arm. I got some bug spray and killed them. I thought!
I then found a nest in my lean to over my front boat seat where my 91 year old father sat when we fished. Well the feces dropped on his boat seat and I cleaned it off and didn’t notice the critters on his seat. So to protect it further and to keep it “clean” I placed a shield over the seat and thought nothing more of it.
About three days after the shield we went fishing and two days after that dad was scratching his belly at the belt line. The area looked like he had a case of shingles and I gave him some cream to help with the itching. I still didn’t have a clue to the Phoebes feces producing the problem and they are sooooo cute and beneficial. Plus they return every year.
Well I finally took a closer look at his boat seat and found literally hundreds of thousands of these little mites. They have 8 as legs seen under a magnifying glass. They had moved all over the 16 foot boat. At least they didn’t look for hiding places but climbed to the highest point they could such as the gunnel of the boat where I leaned and found myself crawling with them By the time I noticed them I must have had several hundred on my arms and belly. I couldn’t kill all of them so they burrowed into my skin also and itched like crazy. Good thing they only lasted for a couple days of misery. I ended up tearing down the nest which had served it’s purpose for reproduction and sprayed the whole boat and then cleaned it with bleach and had no further problems. Until this spring when they came back and tried to nest over the boat again. I tried every maneuver to discourage the little birds from making the nest over the boat. I finally cut a gallon milk jug in half and placed it above the light where she was trying to rebuild the nest and that solved my problem.
The original pair is still nesting under the deck this year but I’ve found none of the mites. I guess they haven’t eaten the kind of critter they did last year that produced the hassles for us.
They are really cool little birds as I watch them skim over the head of the deer in my back yard catching deer flies. The deer are grateful to say the least as are we.
beeb

By: Luke

Luke — Mon, 09 Jul 2007 11:29:02 +0000

One of my favorite things to do on a lazy sunday afternoon is to get out my birdsong CD (the kind with each species on a seperate track, ment for birdwatchers, not the hippie kind used for “atmosphere”), and play it on a boombox on my back porch.

You can attract birds from miles around, and they each go nuts when you play their call!

Then I play a hawk, and everything gets reeeaaal quiet… XD

By: Thomas Siefert

Thomas Siefert — Sun, 08 Jul 2007 13:05:05 +0000

A climate change is not necessarily proof of global warming, also local climate changes caused by global warming could very well turn out to be cooler.

By: Gary Ansorge

Gary Ansorge — Sun, 08 Jul 2007 10:52:54 +0000

The climate shift now has hummingbirds wintering over here in Georgia, when they USED to have to fly to Mexico.

Yeah, there ani’t no global warming.
RIIIIGHT

GAry 7

By: Bill Bones

Bill Bones — Sun, 08 Jul 2007 10:17:07 +0000

There’s a superstition here claiming that swallows bring luck to the home holding their nests and so it’s a wrong idea to remove a swallow nest.

Anyway removing the nests is gratuitous unless they’re dropping their poo on something valuable…