Barn swallows

I do a lot of mowing on the farm.  We have a 6-foot wide zero-turn riding mower, a rotary cutter that gets pulled behind a tractor, and (when it works) a 32-inch riding mower.  Today I was mowing with the Toro -- the zero-turn.  Cleaning up the paths along the driveway, mowing the ditches alongside the township road, around the buildings, and in the orchard.  As I mowed, I gained a following of barn swallows.  If you've never seen barn swallows in action, come visit some sunny summer afternoon and I'll treat you.

Barn swallows have beautiful, almost fluourescent, blue backs.  Their undersides are cream to pale orange/rust, and their tails are deeply forked.  They eat insects, so they migrate south in the winter, and I look for them to return each spring.  When I mow, I disturb insects in the grass & weeds.  The insects fly up to escape the mower (often into my mouth, eyes, ears, and nose) & the barn swallows, who come flying when they hear the mower, swoop past me, now grazing the ground, now soaring into the sky, snatching insects out of the air.  It must be something of a smorgasbord for them.

Whenever I feed the swallows, I am reminded of the interconnectedness of creatures living on our planet.  I just finished reading a novel set during the time of the "Great Leap Forward" in China.  In the late 1950s there was a great famine in China, in large part because the government, run by city dwellers, didn't understand those interconnections.  Birds, especially sparrows, were killed by the millions so they wouldn't eat the plant seeds, or the grain in the fields.  But then the insects that the sparrows also ate didn't have a predator and ate the grain.  The government thought you could grow twice as much grain if you just planted twice as much seed, and that any crop would grow anywhere if the people just worked hard enough.  They didn't understand that there were reasons for the sparrows, and reasons for the traditional crops in a region.

So even though the barn swallows also like to try to build nests in our buildings (picture poop all over the floor), I welcome them back each spring.  On a summer evening they come out of the trees and swoop and dart through the gathering dusk... and I cheer them on because one of the insects they eat is the mosquito!