New Tenants

The view out the back stairwell window is almost always my first glance at the out of doors every morning. It changes with the weather and seasons, of course, but you’d expect that it would otherwise be a fairly static view. I would think that too, but it often surprises me.

At the corners of the house we have these little ledges. They are an architectural element that has been there since the very beginning:

And my Uncle, I believe, made efforts to preserve or reflect those elements despite the re-siding of the house over time - what was once wood is now reflected as metal, but still present.

These residential plots out here in the agricultural territory of the prairie are, as I’ve mentioned before, little islands of wooded area. As such, birds of the tree nesting variety (as opposed to the ground-nesting avians out on the prairie itself) tend to congregate heavily around the house. Spring mornings from mid-May until the earliest days of summer are a riot of jumbled birdsong. Even with the curtains pulled tight against the morning light there is no confusion as to whether the sun has risen.

I can readily verify that we have now reached the point of the year where that is happening before 5:30 AM... ugh...

At any rate, it’s clear that even though we have an abundance of trees, there simply isn’t enough room at the inn for all comers, and it’s inevitable each year that some poor robin or sparrow will try his hand at building a nest on one of those ledges. They are master builders, each and every one, but even mastery can’t defeat physics - the lightweight material atop a smooth surface inevitably succumbs to the spring winds.

Given this history, it wasn’t necessarily a surprise to see a nest under construction on the ledge just out that back stairwell window the other morning. And, when I saw it, it was with the thought that it would be only a short while before the avian architect saw the error of his ways. "Poor chap", I thought, "must be a young whipper-snapper on his first nest building foray, not yet experienced in the trials and travails of trying to nest on our old house".

But then as I watched the master builder came in to do some work and I got lucky enough to capture his image:

Seeing the type of bird I looked closer at the nest. Swallows, in addition to being the aeronautical acrobats of the prairie, build their nests not to nestle in, but to stick. And that does appear to be what is going on here.

The swallows have always been here - or at least as long as I can remember. Our resident population appears to mostly nest in our Old Gray Mare of a decaying barn. I don’t believe that I’ve see any try to nest at the house in the time that we’ve been here. Perhaps the returning population has grown to the point where they need more room than the barn can offer, or perhaps the progressive decrepitude of that structure has caused some of them to look for a nicer neighborhood. Perhaps it’s a combination of both situations.

In any case, we appear to have new tenants for the season here in the homestead.