… the most beautiful Swallow hitherto discovered within the limits of the United States.
– John James Audubon, Ornithological Biography, 1831
… the most beautiful of all the genus hitherto discovered.
– John Kirk Townsend, Description of the Birds of the Columbia River Region, 1836
If we lavished any superlatives on the Tree Swallow, we regret it now… we need all our superlatives for present use… What shall we do for the Violet-green Swallows? Simply this: we will call them children of heaven.
– William Leon Dawson, The Birds of California, 1923
Every season has its splendors, but to claim that any moment exceeds the height of spring requires a temporary forgetting. The fields unfold flowers, trees have spread their leaves, the air rings with song, and the sky is no longer lifeless in winter gray, but blooms with swallows.
And in the oak-filled meadows I love best, a new green joins the lush green hills: the finest of all summer birds, the violet-green swallow. Golondrina verdemar they say in the south—the sea-green swallow. The scientists concur, in a fitting rise to eloquence: Tachycineta thalassina, the swift-mover of Thalassa, primordial spirit of the green Aegean. And so above those seas of windblown grasses, and within those seas of blue above, flies the elfin swallow of the west.
A swallow summary
I’ve given a general overview of our local swallows elsewhere, but a few particulars bear a brief recapitulation. Today’s subject, the violet-green swallow, is one of five swallow species commonly found in Marin. There are some traits that all five share.
First is basic anatomy. Swallows can be recognized by their form, optimized for flight: rounded heads with small bills but broad mouths, short legs, and long, pointed wings. The crowning purpose of this evolutionary focus on flight efficiency is to allow them to spend many hours a day on the wing, procuring nearly all of their food in the form of airborne insects. This feeding style means that swallows tend to favor relatively open habitats, which they compensate for in baby protection by adopting highly enclosed nest sites, either mud-built (the classic worldwide swallow technique), or in banks or tree cavities (a specialty of the American branch of the family including violet-greens).
A second consequence of flight efficiency is that it encourages migration: for us, these are birds of spring and summer. While there is some variation among species, you can expect to see swallows in the Bay Area from roughly March through September. (A much reduced but not insignificant population of tree swallows overwinters, along with a dash of violet-greens.) In winter, these superlatively flyers travel far down into South America, conducting longer migrations than most of our summer songbirds, who typically stop in Mexico and Central America. Swallows epitomize the classic scheme of bird migration: equatorial birds with strong flight capabilities and a dietary preference for insects head up into North America in spring to take advantage of our seasonal explosion of insects. In winter, when the bugs dramatically decrease, they head south.
In brief, swallows have one talent that stands out before all others: flying. This physical excellence enables extreme proficiency at aerial insect hunting and long-distance migration. Those are the key traits of swallowdom in a natural history perspective. What should also be kept in mind is how that underlying fundamental of swallowdom transfers to our human perspective. They are superb at flying—just stop to look at them! The twists and rolls, the rapid dips and effortless ascents—these are what have always captured our imagination. Read the classic of ingenuous nature writing, Gilbert White’s Natural History of Selborne, and the recurrent theme of his observations of swallows (and swifts) quickly becomes clear:
… as I have often observed with some degree of wonder.
Wonderful is the address which this adroit bird shows all day long in ascending and descending.
… a person must have paid very little regard to the wonders of Nature that has not often remarked this feat.
… we could not but wonder when we reflected that these shiftless beings [babies in the nest] in a little more than a fortnight would be able to dash through the air almost with the inconceivable swiftness of a meteor; and perhaps in their emigration, must traverse vast continents and oceans as distant as the equator.
You may be conducting diligent and sober observations, you may be a generally restrained and placid person, but when you watch the flight of swallows, a nearly constant wonder seems the most appropriate reaction.
Distinguishing elves from mortals
Now you know how to recognize swallows. Next you get to learn how to recognize the best swallow.
As I noted in the overview article, our various swallows have their distinctive colors or field marks: rough-winged swallows are dusty brown, while barn and cliff swallows pair dark blue backs with light brown undersides. Then there are the two “white-bellied swallows”: the violet-green and their more widespread relative, the tree swallow.
For most of the country, the tree swallow is the white-bellied swallow. For easterners musing upon a North American field guide, they might see these neighboring range maps upon the page, note the general similarities of shape and plumage, the shared genus and cavity-nesting habit, and think of our bird as a mere western variant of the familiar tree swallow. They might think that violet-greens are to tree swallows what spotted towhees are to eastern towhees, or San Pablo song sparrows to their familiar garden varieties. Those poor, ignorant souls.
Now if you would like to luxuriate in our western jewel of swallows (while blithely disregarding all the birds we don’t have here), the requisite starting point is to actually become a competent recognizer of violet-greens when you see them. If a bird zips by overhead and you congratulate yourself on the violet-green magnificence when it was really a tree swallow, I won’t have done my job well. So let’s start with the practical. There are three basic things to look for in terms of the distinguishing plumage details that separate the two white-bellied swallows:
- From above, their back is green rather than blue. Sometimes, light or position makes it impossible to see any color, but when you can see the color of their backs, they are not the same. “Violet-green” we call them (the violet is a harder to see patch on the lower back); golondrina verdemar (sea-green swallow) they say in Mexico—that stunning green is unambiguously different than the dark metallic blue of the tree swallow.
- Perched or close-up, the violet-green face is white on the cheeks and around the eyes, while the tree swallow’s dark metallic helmet covers the eyes. On perched birds seen from the front, this is the notable feature: hirondelle à face blanche they say in French—the white-faced swallow. You can look for the white cheeks as described like this when perched; as a bird flies by, you might find it easier to look for the contrasting dark eyes, which are essentially invisible on a tree swallow’s dark face.
- At a distance, they wear a white rump patch on their backside. In practice, this appears as a nearly continuous patch, though sticklers will note that it is composed of two separate “saddlebags.” Even on birds that are distant, poorly lit, or more or less overhead, you can often watch for a few moments and wait for a banking bird to reveal a quick flash of white over the tail.
Starting out, focus on those three features. With time, you will pick up more subtle details. The expectations of habitat: in dry woodlands away from water, the violet-green is the expected species (especially once migration wraps up). As moving bodies: violet-greens have a subtly more twitchy, flickering, swift-like flight. And swallows have voices too: the most common violet-green call is a repeated cheet, described in the Peterson guide by Nathan Pieplow as “a coarse monotone chirp.” Sibley accurately distinguishes it from the tree swallow’s similar note as “sharper” and “harder” than the liquid calls of the liquid-loving grump.
Less coarse, more liquid tree calls
Sharp and hard violet-green calls
Listening to swallows in the dark, a digression
Swallows are not generally renowned as singing birds, but they do in fact utter a song at and before dawn. It is easily overlooked because 1) we are usually asleep, 2) they are up in the sky, and 3) the song sounds rather like a continuous chatter of calls. But it is there to be heard and recognized like any bird voice. I’m habitually up at 5 at this time of year, so I can hear the robins and towhees and other members of the standard dawn chorus. But even at that hour, I’m rarely up early enough to beat the violet-greens. I might be lying in bed very pleasantly at say, 4:30, taking some time to actively enjoy the cozy contrast of warm covers and cool, open-windowed air upon my nose—
But if, like Queequeg and me in the bed, the tip of your nose or the crown of your head be slightly chilled, why then, indeed, in the general consciousness you feel most delightfully and unmistakably warm. For this reason a sleeping apartment should never be furnished with a fire, which is one of the luxurious discomforts of the rich. For the height of this sort of deliciousness is to have nothing but the blanket between you and your snugness and the cold of the outer air. Then there you lie like the one warm spark in the heart of an arctic crystal.
– Moby Dick
—and then I’ll turn my hearing upwards and find the world is not as silent as I thought. There is a sound, made faint by distance and therefore easy to tune out and overlook, but when I turn the receiving dishes of my ears skywards, I hear it:
Before dawn when the Robin chorus is in full swing, Violet-green Swallows fly about in the darkness repeating over and over two or three slight notes, tsip tseet tsip.
– Hoffman, Birds of the Pacific States
This is not one of the great melodious songs. But it is the most airborne of the bird songs in my daily life. Half the thrill of those old Romantic poets in their European skylarks seems to come from the simple fact of the song coming from an invisible source in the sky. That holds true here: it’s a simple chatter, but like Shelley’s skylark, it comes from a scorner of the ground, an unbodied joy, and a blithe spirit with whose “clear keen joyance / languor cannot be.”
I step outside, and if I felt sleepy before, I don’t any longer. The day begins before the dawn. I can’t see any birds in the unbrightened starlight, but I can hear that eager chatter, the impatient pulsing in the air. The whole world is sunk in heavy slumber, except for the invisible sea of swallows above my head. Now I too am awake.
Imagine this by moonlight, made loud by the somnolence of the whole non-swallow world.
That’s the practical summary of the identifying traits. Eventually, these minute descriptions of fractional features grow superfluous; with practice, you will rarely confuse the great joyful beauties of the world with those dour curmudgeons the tree swallows.
Yes, you could describe in painstaking detail the differing extent of white upon the face. But the often astute Pete Dunne aptly laid his finger on a more concise encapsulation of the unified effect: the face of the violet-green is elfin, has an ineffable wide-eyed innocent optimism compared to the miserable tree swallows. Of course, it’s not their fault that those blue metallic helmets of theirs are crunched over their eyes like that. Maybe they often have quite chipper thoughts beneath that grumpy visage. But there’s no question which face I find more cheering.
I’ve touched on this various times, but it merits unambiguous clarity: I think it can be perfectly valid to discuss a bird’s “expression” like this, setting aside any claims to psychological accuracy. Words like “grumpy” or “elfin” are both useful practical shorthands and help to form more broadly memorable and significant characters in our mind.
Take this elfin instance. I’m a fan of the high elves of Tolkien’s Middle Earth, but the word has often been used more broadly for a certain fey and footloose kind of being, nimble and weightless, carefree and alert. Elves are never lugubrious, heavy, lethargic, elephantine. They dance in the wind, sing in voices of playful innocence, and have sharp, unclouded eyes. Various elements of this persist in Tolkien’s version, and in their Hollywoodization:
It’s even better in the original, of course, in the solid style of the Old English scholar, where a deep and authentic medievalism gets translated into an accessible amalgam with the modern. The Lord of the Rings distills a disparate elven mythology into a single novel, where that old ideal gets cast into a newly invented story but essentially traditional forms. Legolas sings the “Lay of Nimrodel,” and we hear not just a poem by J.R.R., but an ancient human vision of a not-quite-human race:
Her hair was long, her limbs were white,
And fair she was and free;
And in the wind she went as light
As leaf of linden-tree
All of this basically coheres with my understanding of the Thalassan sky elves. Watch them effortlessly rise and fall, far above us earthbound humans who hardly taste the wind. See them pluck invisible sustenance from the invisible currents of the air. Listen to their undamped chatter, a garrulous stream of quick and unreverberant notes that effortlessly come and go, unlike my plodding words. If any creature can fulfill that elfin vision of a joyful, weightless being, then I’ll seek it up above in the swallow’s flowing skies.
Why I love the sky elf
Birds about which we have not collected at least some personal associations possess but little charm for us.
– Donald Culross Peattie, A Gathering of Birds
I constantly exhort you to biased and prejudiced opinions when it comes to birds. I find my position somewhat out of fashion in contemporary nature writing, beyond anodyne statements of beauty or “interest” which are always kept determinedly general and positive, with none of the reciprocal disregard for other species that is essential to any real bias worthy of the name. Stated baldly like this, I understand that such opinions may appear willfully close-minded (see my Aldo Leopold essay for a more patient elucidation of this idea, expressed with the help of his invariably fair-minded phrasing).
But I persist in this conviction: that a certain amount of bias is necessarily implicit in any deep affection. It’s very difficult to love all things equally. And I do love violet-green swallows. This doesn’t mean that one shouldn’t have reasons for one’s affections. For instance, that blithe and elfin expression and correspondent feeling of weightless, effortless flight are very cheering and lovely to my eyes.
A hard-nosed reader might argue that tree swallows are just about equal as fliers. I say: look more closely: a fourth-of-an-ounce weight difference and a half-inch shorter tail seem like nothing to you, but they make a difference to the swallows, and to the observant.
The objector might argue that it is scarcely fair to judge a bird on the extent to which her cap covers her eyes, which is the major factor in tree swallows’ grumpy expression. I say: go tell someone not to enjoy cute dogs and kittens too while you’re at it, you killjoy.
But I do have a few ecologically broader justifications for my swallow biases. One of them is my general inclination towards western or local specialties over mass market varieties. I showed you the range maps above: tree swallows are a continent-wide bird, while violet-greens are birds of the west. Some people think that an instinctive preference for the local and familiar is a recipe for ignorant provincialism and xenophobia; in nature appreciation, I think it’s a recipe for contentment. In fact, I take my provincialism much further (or closer), not just to a western or Californian scale, but down to the radius to which my own two feet can take me.
This stunning beauty… bred widely in Marin County during the atlas period and appeared to be most numerous in the open oak woodlands in the Novato area.
– Dave Shuford, The Marin County Breeding Bird Atlas
As Dawson summed up living among violet-greens swallows: “We are not yet half alive to our privileges.” Occasionally I think of what it would be like to live somewhere else. Maybe near a university with a big library and regular screenings of old movies. Maybe in a larger population center with better Chinese food. But then I think of the compensations of right here: this very town holds the county seat of acorn woodpeckers and valley oaks, black rails and goldeneyes, and above all violet-green swallows. Emerson insists on the “overpowering importance of neighborhood” because it is unavoidably those who are physically near us with whom we will spend our time: “these, and these only, shall be your life’s companions” (“Considerations by the Way”). This doesn’t apply only to human neighbors.
I awake before dawn, step outside my door, and the very air above me is filled with the songs of these hidden, weightless swallows. To disdain this superterranean blessing out of an abstract sense of fair dealing on behalf of those grumps the tree swallows—who are not over my head at this instant—is an act of self-defeating foolishness. I practice the ancient philosophers’ formula: I desire things to be as they are, and embrace these birds as my life’s companions.
That remark from the Breeding Bird Atlas points to another part of the optimal recipe for pleasing Jack. Not only are they here in my hometown, they are also in my favorite habitat, the oak woodland. I am a terrestrial creature! Tree swallows associate closely with water, and you are unlikely to have them as nesting neighbors unless you live near some pond or wetland. This impacts both that basic fact of their presence or absence in one’s life, depending on where exactly you tend to spend your time, as well as how exactly the swallows live theirs.
The classic hunting path of the tree swallow is probably a low coursing flight over a watery surface, where they trace quite pleasing loops and relays at that modest height in search of the insects rising from the aqueous world. Depending on atmospheric conditions and prey behavior, they will often rise somewhat higher, but usually maintain a certain tethering to the water. This is not an absolute statement—you can and will see tree swallows hunting away from water—but an average tendency.
Violet-greens, in contrast, have no such bonds to ponds. When in the neighborhood, they will certainly take advantage of the plenteous insect prey that is often found around the adjacent wetlands. But they can successfully forage in a great diversity of places, which interestingly seems to lead them into situations that stick in my mind for both their closeness to me and for a particular kind of distance.
Closeness first. Many have noted the willingness of swallows in general to fly close to people. It’s not surprising that they are not particularly fearful of us clumsy walkers—I would find it difficult to pose a threat to anything so fast and agile, even if her flight did take her within a dozen feet of me. This can be sporadically encountered with most species of swallow, but with some more often than others. With tree swallows, due to their proclivity for water, you’ll get closest if you walk along some pond edge. I have had some very pleasant proximities with tree swallows at Las Gallinas, for instance. But that tie to water often creates an unbridgeable distance, given our typically landlocked life.
When I’m walking through an oak-dotted meadow, on the other hand, I am in the full heart of the violet-green domain. There they will loop and twirl, snatching the insects rising from the tall grasses or conducting their commerce between the bursting wildflowers. They will drop from the oaks in vertiginous tumbles and pop up effortlessly in a gap between the ghost pines. I can lie back in a field of lupine and poppies like a well-sated coyote while the sea-greens dart back and forth just above my head, as unconcerned by my presence as the butterflies and windblown leaves. They are too close and too fast for binoculars, and so I set aside all intermediary tools. Hearing and vision are my only intermediaries, and even these seem to diminish in their sense of instrumentality as I track a speeding swallow, and feel the plummeting drop and swift recovery in the very pit of my stomach.
Such closeness is a wonderful thing. But so is its opposite: the sense of rising up and up to impossible heights. The scientists have noted that violet-green swallows often feed in higher reaches of the sky than other swallows. This is measurable, not just poetic fancy. Blow up Sibley’s chart and study the swallow proportions: violet-greens have the longest wings in comparison to their tails—this is an adaptation for high soaring rather than low-elevation dodging of obstacles. They are red-tailed hawks compared to sharp-shins. Barns and cliffs and trees are all nimble, agile beings, but you will rarely watch them continue up and up to utter invisibility.
It is good to grow acquainted with the birds down at our everyday elevation. But it is one of the privileges of associating with birds that they give us the opportunity to climb up higher, using our eyes and ears to maintain a connection and form some idea of what it might be like way up there, where we can’t go. Noisy machines or one-way descents are decidedly not the experience of a free-flying swallow. Only our imaginations let us rise.
And then, after lunch, I’d take a blanket up to the top garden and I’d lie down under the trees in the top garden and listen to things.
I would listen to a small beetle skirting the hairline across my forehead. I would listen to a spider coming through the grass towards the blanket. I’d listen to a squabbling pair of blue tits seesawing behind me. I’d listen to the woodpigeon’s wings whack through the middle branches of an ivy-clad beech tree and the starlings on the wires overhead, and the seagulls and swifts much higher still. And each sound was a rung that took me further upwards, and in this way it was possible for me to get up really high, to climb up past the clouds, towards a bird-like exuberance, where there is nothing at all but continuous light and acres of blue.
– Pond, Claire-Louise Bennett
What birds do I choose for my life’s companions? I choose these elfin emerald swallows, who make me feel ever lighter and more agile, until that day when I too shall weightlessly ascend. I choose these sea-green swallows who summon me before dawn, when all the world is sleeping. And I choose those undimmed faces, who among the oaks have chosen me.
Header photo by Becky Matsubara
“PLODDING” words? Hardly!
Compared to the sky elfs, all human words are plodding – but thank you Bo!
Wow! Really in Novato???
That’s right, Novato is the violet-green capital of Marin. “We are not yet half alive to our privileges!”
Stunning imagery conveyed with words, photos & sounds: delightful! Thank you again, Jack!
Thanks Chris!
Violet green swallows return every year to nest in the nook above my window. I learn and love more about them with every passing year. Recently, I awoke to a rather loud pre-dawn chorus outside my window at 4:30 am. I can confirm the elfin swallow does indeed sing in the early-morning gloaming. Repeated, insistent calls made while perched on the roof, punctuated by swooping rings of flight before returning to the roof. It seemed like a wild song of joy and vitality greeting a new day.