Barn Swallow
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40 free Barn Swallow trivia questions with answers — trivia quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
The barn swallow is one of the most familiar birds on Earth, a graceful flier that has lived alongside people for thousands of years. It nests in our buildings, crosses whole hemispheres twice a year, and has worked its way into proverbs, tattoos, fairy tales and coats of arms. This quiz turns the best barn swallow fun facts into questions: how the bird builds, feeds, drinks and chooses a partner, where it spends the winter, which animals hunt it or shelter it, and what writers, farmers and travellers have believed about it down the centuries. It suits birdwatchers, students and teachers, and anyone who has watched swallows swoop over a field on a summer evening. Every answer comes with a short explanation, so you will finish knowing far more about this small traveller than when you started.
30 of 40 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01In Monty Python and the Holy Grail, who beats the bridgekeeper by asking about a swallow's airspeed?
King Arthur
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.
Q 02In legend, the barn swallow got its forked tail after stealing what from the gods for people?
Fire
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.
Q 03Which African freshwater fish has been recorded leaping out of the water to snatch barn swallows?
Tigerfish
Tigerfish normally eat other fish, but one dam population was confirmed grabbing swallows as they swooped low over the lake after insects.
Q 04Among which group of travellers is a swallow tattoo a traditional symbol of a safe return home?
Sailors
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.
Q 05The hat trade's toll on barn swallows inspired an 1886 essay that led to which conservation group?
Audubon Society
The first Audubon Society followed naturalist George Bird Grinnell's editorial in Forest and Stream, though the killing of egrets usually gets the credit.
Q 06Before migration was understood, what were swallows believed to do when they vanished each winter?
Hibernate
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.
Q 07What do barn swallows carry in their bills, one pellet at a time, to build their cup-shaped nests?
Mud
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.
Q 08Which Greek philosopher wrote an early form of the proverb that one swallow does not make a summer?
Aristotle
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.
Q 09In which Hans Christian Andersen tale does the heroine nurse a swallow that flies her to safety?
Thumbelina
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.
Q 10Which Irish writer's story The Happy Prince has a swallow strip a jewelled statue to help the poor?
Oscar Wilde
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.
Q 11Before barns and bridges existed, where did North American barn swallows build most of their nests?
In caves
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.
Q 12A barn swallow ringed at a Staffordshire nest first proved that British birds winter in which country?
South Africa
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.
Q 13How does a barn swallow usually take a drink from the lakes and rivers it hunts over?
Scooping it up mid-flight
Q 21Which Baltic country made the barn swallow its national bird after a campaign led by ornithologists?
Estonia
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.
Q 22In heraldry the martlet, a stylised swallow-like bird, is always drawn without which body part?
Feet
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.
Q 23In Greek myth, the sisters Procne and Philomela became a swallow and which other songbird?
Nightingale
Nightingale and swallow were the sisters' new forms after their revenge on Tereus, though Greek and Roman writers disagree about which sister became which.
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.
Q 14Why do barn swallows often trail behind tractors, cattle herds and people walking through fields?
To catch insects they stir up
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.
Q 15What colour are an adult barn swallow's glossy upperparts, set off by a rusty forehead and throat?
Steel blue
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.
Q 16North American barn swallows often nest below which fish-eating raptor to deter other birds of prey?
Osprey
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.
Q 17Which birds look like swallows through convergent evolution but are close relatives of hummingbirds?
Swifts
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.
Q 18Which pesticide, later widely banned, caused local barn swallow declines in Israel in the 1950s?
DDT
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.
Q 19Which IUCN Red List category covers the barn swallow, despite declines in parts of Europe and Asia?
Least Concern
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.
Q 20Which naturalist gave the barn swallow its scientific name, Hirundo rustica?
Carl Linnaeus
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.
Q 24Barn swallows ignore seed feeders, but which kitchen scrap will they take from an open platform?
Crushed eggshells
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.
Q 25What wartime job did Frenchman Jean Desbouvrie try to train swallows to do in the late 19th century?
Carry messages
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.
Q 26Which feature of a male barn swallow do many females prefer to be as long as possible?
Tail streamers
Tail streamers advertise quality: longer-tailed males tend to live longer and resist disease better, so a choosy female gains hardier chicks.
Q 27Which birds most often act as helpers, bringing food to the chicks at a barn swallow pair's nest?
Older siblings
Older siblings from the season's first brood sometimes pitch in to feed the second, and now and then an unrelated youngster joins them.
Q 28Where do barn swallows roost at night outside the breeding season, sometimes in their millions?
Reed beds
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.
Q 29Which country's folktale of Heungbu and Nolbu rewards a brother for mending a swallow's broken leg?
Korea
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.
Q 30Why might an unmated male barn swallow kill the nestlings of a pair nesting nearby?
To mate with the female
To mate with the female: losing a brood often breaks up the pair, and the intruder is then on hand as her next partner.