On my mother’s birthday this year, I witnessed the return to our yard of the violet-green swallows. They weave nests in the eaves, in boxes, in the barn, on the carport. Every year we’ve been here, we can watch up-close their building of a life anew; there are at least six nests within close range. Using binoculars and increasingly good telephoto cameras, we see views that are stunning. With so many details—of form, of behavior, of pattern and texture, of color, of sound—it has taken years to learn even the littlest bit about who these guys are.
Last year I learned that they fledge as a process; it’s not the sudden leap out of the nest never to return to the haven of a cupped nest (like the juncos). They take test flights (and I daresay are given lessons by their parents), stand atop the nest box, continue to take meals delivered by their parents’ mouths. And they return again and again to the nest over a period of days.
This year I felt a swell of emotion when I thought they had finally gone. I felt sad, and I missed them. Then the next morning there was a little guy cheeping loudly from inside the nest box opening. A while later he was gone.
I notice their arrival because of the beautiful, seemingly choreographed wide swoops of their curving flight. One day (this year on March 30th) they just appear: Nature’s magic trick of the season. One day (this year on July 3rd) they just leave: Nature’s miracle of birth and growth manifested in the larger flock who departs.
The yard is all but silent now—an emptiness that was just a few days ago filled with the squeaks and chirps of several dozen swallows.
And I feel great affection for these birds now. As a little girl going for the touted annual outing with Grandpa (visiting from across the country) to see the swallows return to the mission at San Juan Capistrano, I felt nothing. I don’t even recall a memory of seeing those birds everyone was calling “swallows.” I think for a long time in my early childhood, I imagined those birds looking like seagulls or pigeons.
But today I have built a relationship with them:
gotten to know them,
studied their shape and behaviors,
enjoyed their delightful flight,
savored their striking markings of teal, purple, white, dark gray, royal blue.
And fallen in love with these creatures.
So when—on the same day the violet-green swallows finally fledged and left the yard—I found a dead swallow up against the house, I felt the loss as if he were kin.
We are kindred beings.
I immediately got a trowel so that I could create a proper burial site, mindful to not go too deep so that his natural decomposition would be fodder for other beings: the gift of life in death. I was going to place him in my beautiful lily garden beneath the scores of blooming red, yellow, and orange stems—the place I buried two juncos a few years ago. But those who feast on small birds who have perished were already well at work on the swallow’s underside; I opted to bury him in situ. I marked the place of his passing with flowers from the yard; I marked the fact of his passing with a prayer of blessing and gratitude.
