40 Fun Facts About Barn Swallow

In Monty Python and the Holy Grail, who beats the bridgekeeper by asking about a swallow's airspeed?

King Arthur asks which kind of swallow is meant, and the stumped bridgekeeper is thrown into the gorge himself. In Britain the barn swallow is simply called the swallow.

In legend, the barn swallow got its forked tail after stealing what from the gods for people?

Fire was the prize, and in the tale an angry god hurled a burning brand after the thief, singeing away the bird's middle tail feathers.

Which African freshwater fish has been recorded leaping out of the water to snatch barn swallows?

Tigerfish normally eat other fish, but one dam population was confirmed grabbing swallows as they swooped low over the lake after insects.

Among which group of travellers is a swallow tattoo a traditional symbol of a safe return home?

Sailors earned one swallow after 5,000 nautical miles at sea and a second after 10,000, honouring a fellow wanderer that always finds its way back.

The hat trade's toll on barn swallows inspired an 1886 essay that led to which conservation group?

The first Audubon Society followed naturalist George Bird Grinnell's editorial in Forest and Stream, though the killing of egrets usually gets the credit.

Before migration was understood, what were swallows believed to do when they vanished each winter?

Hibernate was the answer scholars gave from antiquity, and some even claimed the birds passed the cold months under water, an idea still being argued in the 1870s.

What do barn swallows carry in their bills, one pellet at a time, to build their cup-shaped nests?

Mud is gathered wet in the bill and often mixed with grass stems to form pellets, and pairs frequently patch up and reuse an old nest instead of starting from scratch.

Which Greek philosopher wrote an early form of the proverb that one swallow does not make a summer?

Aristotle used it in his Nicomachean Ethics to argue that one fine day proves no more than one bird does, though his version says spring instead of summer.

In which Hans Christian Andersen tale does the heroine nurse a swallow that flies her to safety?

Thumbelina tends the bird in secret through the winter, and it repays her by carrying her far away just before she must marry a mole.

Which Irish writer's story The Happy Prince has a swallow strip a jewelled statue to help the poor?

Oscar Wilde published it in 1888, and his swallow keeps putting off its winter journey to carry the statue's gems and gold leaf to the needy, then dies of the cold.

Before barns and bridges existed, where did North American barn swallows build most of their nests?

In caves is where they once nested across the continent, but today only the birds of California's Channel Islands still regularly do, the rest having moved in with people.

A barn swallow ringed at a Staffordshire nest first proved that British birds winter in which country?

South Africa it was: the bird ringed by James Masefield was found in Natal in December 1912, the first hard proof of where Britain's swallows went each autumn.

How does a barn swallow usually take a drink from the lakes and rivers it hunts over?

Scooping it up mid-flight, mouth open, is the usual way, and the bird bathes like that too, dipping into the water for an instant without landing.

Why do barn swallows often trail behind tractors, cattle herds and people walking through fields?

To catch insects they stir up: moving animals and machines flush prey into the air, and the birds hunt low, sometimes only inches above the ground.

What colour are an adult barn swallow's glossy upperparts, set off by a rusty forehead and throat?

Steel blue covers the back, and the male's gloss is brighter than the female's, a subtle clue for telling apart two birds that otherwise look much alike.

North American barn swallows often nest below which fish-eating raptor to deter other birds of prey?

Osprey nests make safe neighbours because the big birds eat only fish yet scare off other raptors, while the swallows' loud warnings alert them to danger in return.

Which birds look like swallows through convergent evolution but are close relatives of hummingbirds?

Swifts evolved the same shape for catching insects in the air, but they sit in a separate order, Apodiformes, and are not songbirds at all.

Which pesticide, later widely banned, caused local barn swallow declines in Israel in the 1950s?

DDT use hit the birds there, a rare setback for a species that has mostly gained from people, whose barns and bridges gave it safe places to nest.

Which IUCN Red List category covers the barn swallow, despite declines in parts of Europe and Asia?

Least Concern reflects a range that spans most of the globe and a population put at about 190 million birds, even where modern farming has thinned local numbers.

Which naturalist gave the barn swallow its scientific name, Hirundo rustica?

Carl Linnaeus chose plain Latin: Hirundo means swallow and rustica means of the country, a fair label for a bird of farms and open fields.

Which Baltic country made the barn swallow its national bird after a campaign led by ornithologists?

Estonia knows the bird as suitsupääsuke, and it is such a familiar guest in homes and farm buildings there that scientists lobbied for the title.

In heraldry the martlet, a stylised swallow-like bird, is always drawn without which body part?

Feet are left off because people once believed such birds had none and never landed, and in heraldry the martlet came to stand for younger sons with no land.

In Greek myth, the sisters Procne and Philomela became a swallow and which other songbird?

Nightingale and swallow were the sisters' new forms after their revenge on Tereus, though Greek and Roman writers disagree about which sister became which.

Barn swallows ignore seed feeders, but which kitchen scrap will they take from an open platform?

Crushed eggshells supply calcium and may also work as grit that helps the birds digest their prey, which is why they pick up small pebbles too.

What wartime job did Frenchman Jean Desbouvrie try to train swallows to do in the late 19th century?

Carry messages, he argued, because swallows fly higher and faster than pigeons and are harder to shoot; France approved tests, but he never followed through.

Which feature of a male barn swallow do many females prefer to be as long as possible?

Tail streamers advertise quality: longer-tailed males tend to live longer and resist disease better, so a choosy female gains hardier chicks.

Which birds most often act as helpers, bringing food to the chicks at a barn swallow pair's nest?

Older siblings from the season's first brood sometimes pitch in to feed the second, and now and then an unrelated youngster joins them.

Where do barn swallows roost at night outside the breeding season, sometimes in their millions?

Reed beds can hold more than a million birds, which arrive in one synchronised rush that is thought to overwhelm the falcons waiting for them.

Which country's folktale of Heungbu and Nolbu rewards a brother for mending a swallow's broken leg?

Korea's tale has the healed bird return with a seed whose fruits are filled with treasure, while the greedy brother who breaks a bird's leg on purpose is punished.

Why might an unmated male barn swallow kill the nestlings of a pair nesting nearby?

To mate with the female: losing a brood often breaks up the pair, and the intruder is then on hand as her next partner.

In Venezuela and Trinidad, wintering barn swallows flock to burnt or harvested fields of which crop?

Sugarcane fields draw the birds once burnt or cut, and so do the leftovers from processing the cane; elsewhere in winter they favour savanna and ranches.

Farm superstition said destroying a barn swallow's nest would bring which misfortune on the cows?

Bloody milk, or none at all, was the threat, and hens were said to stop laying too, fears that may explain why some nests stay in use for decades.

Which kind of swallow, not the barn swallow, famously returns each March to San Juan Capistrano?

Cliff swallows, square-tailed cousins of the barn swallow, winter in South America, and the town's old Spanish mission celebrates their return each Saint Joseph's Day.

Which yellow wildflower, said to bloom when swallows return, is named from the Greek for swallow?

Celandine comes from the Greek chelidon, and ancient writers added that the flower faded again when the swallows left, hence its other old name, swallowwort.

Which Roman poet's Georgics already describes the swallow hanging its nest from the rafters?

Virgil's line of 29 BC is an early written record of the bird sharing human buildings, a habit it seems to have had in the Old World since time immemorial.

Which English parson's Natural History of Selborne includes a pioneering study of the swallow?

Gilbert White watched the birds of his Hampshire village for decades, and he knew this one as the chimney-swallow, though he noted it often built in barns.

In which country does savignii, the only barn swallow subspecies that never migrates, live all year?

Egypt's swallows stay in the Nile valley all year and look different too, with deep reddish underparts in place of the pale belly of European birds.

Since about 1980, some North American barn swallows have stayed to nest in which South American country?

Argentina now has a small but growing breeding population, founded by migrants that stayed behind instead of flying back north to nest.

Male barn swallows have been found faking which kind of call to break up their partners' affairs?

Alarm calls normally warn of a hawk or a cat, so a false one scatters the birds and cuts short a rival's approach to the caller's partner.

The English name barn swallow may be a translation of ladusvala, a word from which language?

Swedish ladusvala means exactly that, and an English book mentioned the word in 1789, decades before barn swallow was first recorded as an English name in 1851.