Every spring, we have a couple of swallows that return to a mud nest on our front porch. We enjoy watching them rear their young; they usually raise two batches of baby birds each year.
This year, in keeping with the 2020 theme, both nests failed! (There’s been nestling deaths in the past, but never two whole nests in one season.) The first failure happened a few weeks ago; we knew when we saw several broken (not hatched) eggs that had been pushed out of the nest. And now the second batch, this time 3-4 hatched successfully, has been picked off by a hawk. Adrianna had seen a hawk fly into the porch last week, but we didn’t know if it had been successful or not. I didn’t think it would be able to reach into the nest whose opening is only a few inches high due to how close to the roof it is. But today, the swallows were going crazy in our front yard and I spotted a hawk in the tree. We’d found a small, dead bird under the tree where it was perched yesterday, but there was still at least one baby in the nest this morning when I checked. But this afternoon, none. And there is damage to the nest. Even after the swallow parents chased the hawk off (with the help of a couple of additional neighborhood swallows), our swallow parents continued to fly around the cul-de-sac chirping their distress call for a couple of hours. 😔
Bree, who loves our birds, fell to the ground in distress when she found out and yelled, “This is the worst year ever!”
