April 17, 2014
Northern Rough-winged swallow upperwing
Northern Rough-winged swallow upperwing

I’m an early morning person.  Two days a week my workday begins at 6:00am.  Three or four days a week I’m running the greenbelt at 4:00 or 4:30am.  On weekends I’m often out greeting the sunrise with binoculars and camera.  Since this affliction is year round rather than seasonal, I see a lot of zero dark thirty.  And a fair amount of nightbirds.

A month ago, March 12th to be exact, over an hour before official sunrise and well before even a hint of the coming dawn on the eastern sky, I realized the thing flitting across the corners of my peripheral vision, through the banks of lit floodlights at my workplace, was not an optical floater but an actual bird.  And not a nightbird!

Size and flight giss told me it was a swallow, and a close passage in its erratic flight pattern allowed me to see, even without binoculars, that it was a Northern Rough-winged.  By itself.  There was nothing else moving except lots of moths swooping up to the lights, then hurling themselves toward the ground.  The swallow was obviously having an early breakfast, but I thought it curious that it was alone and out before dawn.

Here’s what I know about Northern Rough-winged Swallows.  Spring migrants begin showing up in Arizona as early as mid-February, they migrate by day, they typically feed over water, and spring migration is more protracted and in looser assemblage than fall migration.  Here again, then, was an example of opportunistic feeding—we put up lights, lights attract bugs, aggregations of bugs draw a hungry bird to the intersection of an unexpected place and an unsuspected time.  Swallows may well be genetically programmed, now, to associate lights in the dark with food.

This swallow encounter reminded me of something that has always puzzled me.  Every serious birder associates particular birds with memorable events or periods in their life but, considering they are common, small, and rather nondescript, swallows seem to attract outsized love and remembrance in the birding world.  At zero dark thirty this past March, it finally dawned on me why.

Although I grew up in the upper Midwest, I didn’t become a serious birder until, as an adult, I had left long and dreary winters far behind for parts far west and southwest.  In my birding life swallows have been just part of the passing avian scene, not the earliest and most emotionally embraced harbingers of spring so rapturously anticipated and verbally celebrated by my winter weary colleagues in the east and north.

Spring on the Pacific coast and in southwestern deserts is just a notation on a calendar, not an actual weather antidote for raging cabin fever.  As an adult I’ve always enjoyed spring, but I’ve never needed it.  So, yes, swallows for the poor captives of the polar vortex, themselves opportunistically feeding at the trough of avian seasonal change, and for me a zero dark thirty encounter that finally led me to appreciate swallows for their unique niche in the natural world, not just the one in our human psyche.

Northern Rough-winged Swallow ventral
Northern Rough-winged Swallow ventral