Swallows by Susan L.

  A friend told me yesterday that Barn Swallows are now on the endangered list. She has had a pair nest in her garage for a number of years. Last summer she kept it closed so they couldn't get in because they made a frightful mess of her car. This year, she is moving her car outside and is leaving the garage open so these lovely little birds can make their home. Helping these beautiful birds begins one nest at a time.
  There was a man many years ago who took on reviving the endangered Eastern Bluebird. It's a brilliant blue bird with the colour of golden sunshine on its breast. He built birdhouses specifically designed for them so the starlings, not a native species, couldn't steal them. He installed and monitored hundreds of these racoon proof houses in farm fields. They are now a species at risk, a huge improvement.
  The swallow is different. They don't use holes to raise their young instead they build mud nests one beak full at a time attached to the rafters of barns and other buildings. Wood barns, their favorite nesting site, are slowly vanishing, crumbling into the forgotten pages of history.
  I never see them around my place. I'm in the trees and swallows like open fields for hunting insects. They devour mosquitoes at an astounding rate. One more good reason to let them nest in our garages or outbuildings.
  There were a couple or three pairs at the farm. In the spring, I would stand in the middle of the yard with a fluffy duck feather held up high. A nest building swallow would swoop down and take it from my fingers almost faster than the eye could follow. If the summer was long enough, they would raise two or three broods. I never tired of watching them fly, the fighter jets of the avian world. To lose them would be a crying shame.
  Lord, forgive us for not being the stewards of this planet you called us to be.
  I do have a question though. Before we colonized North America and built our barns, where did the barn swallows nest? Does anyone know?
  "Then the Lord God took the man and put him in the garden of Eden to tend and keep it." Gen 1:15