Given a choice these days, we leave and enter the house not in the usual way but through the garage or the east door.  Dive-bombing birds are the reason.

Swallows!  And not just one or two at a time.  Sometimes as many as six!  Usually four.  Having a fast-flying, angrily chirping feathered missile coming at you is bad enough.  But one after another in kamikaze fashion is hard on the nerves to say the least.

The reason for the aggressive behavior is abundantly apparent.  In the nest just feet from the top of our main house entrance, four baby swallows are looking suspiciously ready to fly.  At least one is at that overflowing-the-nest stage and has already taken a short test flight to the top of the very doorway we customarily use.

Mom and Pop Swallow have been wonderfully protective parents from the get-go. Until their eggs hatched, one parent or the other would sit on the nearby gate and scold us relentlessly when we had the audacity to approach their territory.  Never mind that we were here first.  The swallows definitely look at proprietary rights from a different viewpoint.

Mom at Work

But, even after their babies had hatched, the parent swallows took turns scolding and flying around nearby.  There was no dive-bombing.  And there were only two nest guardians.  Now all of a sudden there are four.  Or even six!  What’s with that?

At first, I thought that perhaps two couples were sharing the homestead.  Does that ever happen?  Could those four babies belong to two sets of parents?  No amount of research corroborated such an idea.  So… how about an Auntie Patrol?  Or a Neighborhood Watch Program?

I talked to Diane Buttrell about the situation and it just happens that today a bird expert is coming to talk to the Oysterville Science Academy.  The plan is to make our swallow family a part of their day’s field trip excursion.  It should make the perfect opportunity to put into practice some of those scientific principals they’ve been learning about – observation, inference, and maybe some conclusion-drawing.   Nevertheless, we will be continuing with alternate methods of ingress and egress until the nest is empty.