Cliff Swallows

The bright brown hillside sings brilliantly in the sun as hundreds of swarming swallows dance around the edges of the rock face as if gravity never existed. Like a busy apartment block in some major metropolitan area, this scene is nothing less than the embodiment of serious city living, be it human or animal. The Cliff Swallow breeds in North America, and is migratory, wintering in western South America from Venezuela southwards to northeast Argentina. This species is a very rare vagrant to western Europe. They build conical mud nests and lay 3-6 eggs. The natural nest sites are on cliffs, preferably beneath overhangs, but as with the Eurasian House Martin, man-made structures are now the principal locations for breeding. Female Cliff Swallows are known to lay eggs in and move previously laid eggs into the nests of other birds within the colony. This species has always been plentiful in the west of North America, where there are many natural sites. European settlement provided many new nest sites on buildings, but the population declined in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries as the supply of unpainted barns declined. This sound uses the following file from Freesound: http://www.freesound.org/samplesViewSingle.php?id=70096