The swallow does not go back to its young with a single fly at a time, but with a mouth filled as full as possible, so that those who try to calculate the usefulness of this bird by the number of the journeys that it makes to its nest, underestimate its destruction of insects by probably fifty per cent. Although, perhaps, few who watch the birds know it, the swallow’s wide-gaping mouth is sticky inside, so that everything it catches it holds, and in this way is spared interminable miles of journeying. To see them at their best is when a hawk passes, and, for sheer mischief, the swallows chase it.
The hawk is flying, as hawks can fly, with great swiftness; but look at the velocity of the swallows, which fly round and round the hawk as it goes! They hover over it, loiter by the side of it, make excursions ahead of it, and come back, mock it, in fact, as if it were an owl, or as hares might mock and mob a tortoise. And the hawk never even pretends to chase one of the swallows, but goes doggedly on its way, as fast as it can go, to the cover of the wood. To see the swallow at its worst is upon the ground: there it is a poor thing indeed, and from the shortness of its legs and the length of its wings, has to shuffle along, rather than walk.
But it does not often condescend to walk on the ground. When it alights, to knead the plaster for its nest at a puddle’s edge, or for any other purpose, it springs up into the air from the spot on which it settled. And its nest once built, it has no reason for coming to the ground at all. It does so from choice sometimes, where it suspects insects are congregated, or sometimes to drink, but, as a rule, it both eats and drinks on the wing. When it rests, it is on a house-roof, a railing, or dead branch, and often when thus seated it sings a very sweet, simple little song, loud enough to puzzle the passer-by, who can hear but not see the songster, and pretty enough to astonish those who imagine that swallows only twitter.
While the hen-bird is brooding she is busily fed by her mate, and the compliments that pass whenever the two birds meet are very sweet to listen to.
Every time he comes there is a scrap of conversation, and when she has eaten what he has brought, there is a little exchange of twittered love-nothings. There are always two broods in the year, the first scattering over the country and eventually straggling away in small migratory parties across the sea, the second going with their parents in the great annual exodus in October.