A Swallow Story
My story begins with a birds nest. Not a nest in a tree or a rock as you might think, but a nest against the porch ceiling of a farm-cottage on the Southern Coast of KwaZulu Natal. During the first week of August 2012, a family of swallows decided that the ceiling of my porch was the ideal place to build their home. After just a few days of hard labour and flying up and down carrying building material, there was a nicely constructed swallow nest in-between the support beams of my porch ceiling. I decided not to invade their privacy and they spent the entire summer keeping us company until it was time for them to leave for the long journey up north again.
Shortly after they left in early 2013, I decided to do some home renovations by closing off the porch area and turning it into an extra room and add a new porch. Although the swallow nests would now be inside my house, I made sure however to not disturb my new neighbour’s real estate in their absence and thus left the nest in position. The cold winter passed and the long summer days brought with them the return of my swallows, who at first seemed to be a bit confused with my alterations to their neighbourhood, but soon figured out that they can still get to their front door by flying in an out a window that I left open for them day and night. I marked the other windows with white “shoe shine” to make sure that the little guys don’t fly into a closed window. The pair had two sets of little ones that year, first a trio and then a set of twins.
Tragedy however struck when we decided to go away for a long weekend and our domestic helper, not knowing that there was a second batch of babies still in the nest, closed the window, preventing the parents to get to the two newly hatched swallow babies. Sadly when we got back, it took only days to realise that there was a smell coming from the nest and that the two babies had obviously not survived the ordeal. So we had to demolish the nest with the unfortunate babies inside. The other three babies from the first batch were already airborne by then and got stronger as the days went by. They left with their parents during middle May of that year to make their first seasonal journey. Needless to say, I felt guilty and decided to make up for this by constructing them brand new artificial homes.
I am no swallow and no engineer and I knew that my humble attempt to substitute their master building skills might not pay off, but I went ahead anyway. So, using the inner foam from an old windsurfing board, chicken wire and cement I did my best to build, what I can only describe as counterfeit nests, and then I waited…
Early in August of 2014 while sitting outside my house, I noticed some very angry bird chatter coming from a beam high up on the second story of the neighbouring house. I looked up and to my surprise, I saw my former swallow neighbours back from their European summer, and very disgusted that their home was gone. I quickly rushed to my storeroom where I kept my pre-constructed swallow nests and attached them to my former porch ceiling with a few pieces of wire and a perching stick at the entrances of both the nests.
It wasn’t long before my feathered friends started inspecting these strange new objects which were now sitting in the exact place where their homes use to be. Then to my amazement, they started flying in and out the window, each time bringing a little bit of mud, obviously fixing up the imperfections of my attempts. Within a few days, they seemed to have completed the renovations, and moved in! It didn’t take very long for me to realise that the little swallow family have expanded and that there were new babies in the artificial nests, and once again we had two sets of chicks, a pair of twins and once again triplets. In May of 2015 five babies in total left the nests with their parents. I was really proud that my humble attempt at nest building was accepted by these gracious little birds. However, I have to admit that I should not take all the credit for the success of this story.
Of course, we all know that sleeping with an open window is a very risky thing to do, and this is where a little side-story came in which started when Gert, an old car guard at “Pitstop” a popular local restaurant passed away expectantly. It seemed that Gert’s track-record of nine years without one incident on the vehicles he watched came because of the help he had. In a small box next to the parking area, a little old cross sausage dog named Piekie was the second member of this successful security team. When Gert passed away, the decision was made to put Piekie down, since Piekie was about 20 years old. On visiting the restaurant I heard of this and intervened, rescuing Piekie from certain death. Piekie then took it upon himself, obviously drawing on his years of security experience, to guard the swallow nests and the open window. With the little birdies now gone for the winter, both Piekie and I are eagerly awaiting their return in August of this year, and who knows, maybe they bring some new prospective homeowners with to check out the new human-style of swallow nest! I’m keeping a spare nest in the storeroom just in case!
