Swallows love a pub crawl

THE smoking ban has benefited swallows.

I was having a pint in my local, the other evening, and the smokers were ducking and cursing as a pair of swallows whizzed about at head height, attending to their nest under the low roof.

Swallows are masters of precision-flying, and they never hit anyone, though there were near-misses.

Good nest sites are vital to swallows, and they re-use them year after year, often for generations. Occasionally they lose one, and they can be frantic in their search for a replacement. Smoking areas in pubs are ideal, undercover, with suitable beams, and access to the outside world.

Male swallows arrive in this country before the females and the nest site is their responsibility. Once it’s established, the male’s job is to find a mate.

Swallows are ‘genetically polygamous, but socially monogamous’. This means they mate for life, but play around a lot. They often lose their mates, because of the rigours of their long migration.

The male’s success in finding a mate is related to the length of his tail streamers. The longer the streamers, the more attractive he is —— they are an indication of health and strength. Among European breeding birds (they breed all over the world), male tail streamers are longer in more northerly countries. This may be related to the length of the migration route. In Spain, male streamers are only 5% longer than female ones, while in Denmark they are 20% longer.

They produce two broods in a summer, occasionally three. The same nest is used; in fact, it’s repaired and re-used the following year. This is unusual among birds. Most species prefer to build new nests to reduce the build-up of parasite populations.

Swallows were restricted to caves and cliff ledges for their nest sites, but this is very rare nowadays. But, like sparrows and pigeons and house mice and brown rats, they developed a relationship with human beings and human structures, and their population numbers and their range increased dramatically as humans took over the globe. Now, they’ve adapted to smoking areas.