The Backyard Birds Newsletter

"One swallow does not a summer make," my grandmother used to tell me. She probably learned it from her own grandmother. The saying goes all the way back to Aristotle and The Nicomachean Ethics, about 325 B.C. I'll bet Aristotle heard it from his grandmother, too.

But in truth, I don't know that I've ever seen one single swallow all by itself. When you find a swallow, usually you find a dozen, or maybe hundreds.

When I fell in love with birds, I learned that bank swallows nest in colonies, where they dig tunnels into a bare, vertical cliff or bank, such as a long river. For years, every time I crossed a river, I looked for bak swallow nest holes, but never found any. Then one Sunday, as my husband and I drove past a construction company's huge sand pile near the Skunk River, only a few miles where we lived, I noticed a lot of holes near the top of the pile, with birds flying around them. "Stop!" I shouted in Michael's ear. "That's got to be bank swallows!"