Surrounded by Swirling Swallows:
The Animal Encounter of a Lifetime
Gavin Greenfield
©
Copyright 2022 by Gavin Greenfield
|
Photo by Julian on Unsplash |
The era of discovery is
mostly over in the field of zoology. Long gone are the days when
intrepid adventurers could
discover
large and colorful animals every day simply by walking through
distant and remote lands previously unexplored by Western scientists.
These days, discovering a new animal species larger than a quarter is
mostly accomplished in a lab by running samples of DNA through
complex algorithms consisting of long expanses of code. The hard work
is done in front of a computer screen from the comfort of an air
conditioned office instead of a place actually inhabited by the
animal being discovered.
The situation is hardly
different when it comes to animal behavior. Any person with a Roku
can observe more species in a single day than the most important
biologists of all time were able to in a lifetime of exploration.
Modern scientists have conducted and recorded endless hours of
behavioral observations, and those wishing to discover something new
can hardly do more than pick around the margins with the aid of
technological gadgets and advanced statistical models.
For these reasons, I
continue to have great appreciation for a truly unique animal
encounter I experienced over 15 years ago. I’ve come face to
face with dozens of bears, moose, and elk, I’ve held large
birds of prey, and I’ve even had the pleasure of spotting
multiple mountain lions (from the safety of a pickup truck
thankfully), but the wildlife encounter that sticks with me the most
involves the humble bank swallow, a mostly brown bird measuring five
inches long and sporting a bill scarcely larger than a pen point.
It would be easy to think
that there isn’t much to be gained in observing the smallest of
the North American swallows, a bird which lacks the colorful plumage
or renown of some of its more familiar cousins, but I consider myself
fortunate to have been in the right place at the right time for a few
brief moments which allowed me to witness a behavior never recorded
by other people and which profoundly deepened my appreciation for the
natural world.
That place was an
undistinguished spot along the banks of the Powder River in northeast
Wyoming, and the time was in early May when the breeding season for
bank swallows was approaching its peak. This location is one that
will never be visited by tourists —it’s located on
private land, but I don’t expect many people would go out of
their way to see it even if it were open to the public. It isn’t
substantially different from any other place among the expanses of
flat agricultural land that dominate this part of the world. The
landscape is green and open, containing few trees and shrubs which
are mostly clustered near the Powder, which as a slow and shallow
river that one can easily wade across, isn’t especially
noteworthy.
I was there because I was
working as a wildlife biology field technician for the spring and
summer. It was my first season doing this type of work; just a few
weeks before, I’d left a tedious office job just outside of
Washington, DC and made the cross-country journey to Wyoming to
embark on not just a new career, but a new path in life, one which I
hoped would involve being outside in remote areas and observing
wildlife as much as possible. The work was nothing special – I
just had to navigate my way to some hidden corner of Wyoming before
sunrise every morning, walk to some pre-determined points, and write
down every bird I could hear and see during a ten-minute observation
period. But it suited me just fine. I was happy to be out in nature
and far from the stress and sensory overload of the big city, I
rarely encountered other people, and I had most of the day to read,
relax, listen to music, or just walk around.
Nothing out of the
ordinary happened during my workday before I encountered the bank
swallows. I made it out to my survey sites without any trouble and
carried out the work. It was a warm and sunny morning, and I was
walking back to where I had parked my truck in good spirits, probably
thinking about nothing more significant than what I was going to eat
for lunch.
I was walking along the
river, or more accurately a few feet above the river, as I often did
on the way back to the truck as rivers serve as easily navigable
landscape features. Many rivers form what are called cut banks –
think of a cut bank like a mini-canyon: after erosion occurs, little
walls form on either side of the river. The cut banks in this area
were no more than ten feet high, but this is high enough to create
ideal nesting habitat for bank swallows.
I had already gained some
familiarity with bank swallows because of the distinctive nests they
dig in the walls of cut banks. Bank swallow colonies can be quite
extensive, consisting of thousands of nests. A big colony looks like
a series of mailboxes you might see in an office or behind the desk
of an old hotel – a grid of closely packed rectangles forming
several rows and columns. I always enjoyed seeing these nests and
watching the swallows fly in and out of them, on the one hand because
it’s simply cool to watch, but also because it made it very
easy for me to identify the birds. As a novice bird identifier, I
always appreciated anything that made my task easier. Although I had
observed plenty of bank swallows in the short time I’d been in
Wyoming, I had never interacted with them before, or I should say
they had never interacted with me.
I was walking far enough
away from the edge of the cliff that I couldn’t see the river
below. Some movement caught my eye and I saw a bank swallow emerge
from below the horizon formed by the top of the cut bank. It was
followed by another, and then another, and I stopped abruptly as the
swallows continued to emerge. One by one, a stream of bank swallows
appeared. The best analogy I can think of is when the individual
players on a football team run out of the tunnel and advance onto the
field, fanning out in an ever-widening formation. The analogy is also
apt for the sheer number of birds that joined the emerging mass. By
the time it ended, there were somewhere between 75 and 100 of these
fast moving little birds, and it didn’t take me long to realize
that the reason for their emergence and aggregation was me! I must
have been treading right on top of one of their colonies, and with
the breeding season picking up steam, the reverberations from my
strides must have roused them and represented a threat to their newly
formed nests.
They closed in on me and
began circling around me scarcely more than arm’s reach away in
a tight clockwise formation, chattering all the while. Before I knew
it, I was enveloped in an undulating, loud, and rapidly moving vortex
in which the individuality of the birds seemed to melt and reform
into a synchronous unit moving in formation under the control of a
single mind or perhaps executing a well-practiced maneuver with
military precision. As I stood still, equally puzzled and in awe of
the situation unfolding before me, I wondered to myself “should
I be afraid?” An individual swallow is tiny, but a hundred
swallows might equate to something much more menacing. Indeed, from
time to time one of the birds would break out of the swirling mass
and barrel in towards me while making a soft “chip” noise
before quickly reversing course and rejoining the circling squadron.
Each approach brought the bird a couple feet from my face, but after
several of these encounters, it became clear that I wasn’t in
any danger.
Now I was able to enjoy
it for what it was, a beautiful phenomenon that has never been
documented, a rare behavior that one could only learn about by being
fortunate enough to walk in a certain place during a certain time of
the year. Surrounded by the swift and acrobatic movements of the
birds, bright sun, blue sky, and green grass and trees, part of me
was tempted to act like Julie Andrews in The Sound of Music,
to lift my face to the sky, spread my arms, and rotate in unison with
the circling swallows. Even with no one there to see me, I couldn’t
give myself over to such obvious sentimentality, so after observing
the spectacle for a little bit longer I decided to restart my return
to the truck. I was probably hungry.
As I fearlessly walked
into the mass of the swirling cloud of swallows, the birds parted
before me like a throng of courtiers giving way to their king. Once
the formation had broken, it was as though a switch had been flipped.
No longer operating as a single unit with a collective mind, the
birds scattered randomly in all directions before disappearing under
the shelf of the cut bank and presumably returning to whatever labor
they had been performing before my arrival. In an instant, the
surreal quality of the dream-like event vaporized and I was returned
to the mundane reality I had occupied just a few minutes before.
Aside from the indelible impression on my memory and the impact on my
emotional state, there was no trace of what had just occurred. It was
as if the birds invited me to partake in a mysterious and secretive
ritual at the conclusion of which we tacitly agreed to continue on
with our lives, with the rest of the world’s sentient beings
none the wiser.
Although I’ve
written scientific papers about birds, there’s no room in
modern science journals for an article about the phenomenon I
observed — I’m about 100 years too late for that type of
thing to be of any interest to the biological community. I won’t
receive any accolades for my discovery and it won’t advance my
legacy or be counted as a major contribution to the field. Instead,
all I’ll have is the memory of an amazing and fleeting
experience which lasted no more than a couple of minutes. An
experience during which a small and not especially valued species
briefly let me into its world and allowed me to experience something
special and totally out of the ordinary, even for someone who worked
closely with wildlife for over a decade.
To this day, I’m
grateful that the humble bank swallow allowed me a glimpse into its
secret and unobserved life. My encounter was exactly the type of
event I hoped to experience when
I chose
to dramatically alter the course of my life by trading a career as a
low level functionary in county government for the life of a nomadic
seasonal biology technician. It helped to solidify my conviction that
I’d made the right decision, that there was meaning to be found
among the sights and sounds of nature, far from the tubular
fluorescent lights and keyboard tapping observed in a typical office
setting. I didn’t get to name a species after myself or achieve
any glory as a scientist, but I’d like to think I was able to
feel the same thing that the illustrious early biologists did —
a sense of discovery and awe independent of any acclaim from the
scientific establishment, but enjoyed strictly between animal and man
and all the more pure for its exclusion of any other considerations.
This experience helped to
propel my course as a biologist forward, and although I was fortunate
to experience many intense moments of communion with wild animals, I
never quite recaptured the powerful feeling which resulted from my
short encounter with the bank swallows just a few weeks after I
started down this path. This memory is one that I recall vividly and
deeply treasure, and one which gives me hope that even though our
catalog of animals and animal behavior is nearly complete, anyone can
have a unique and deeply moving encounter with wildlife as long as
they are open to receive it and spend enough time seeking out quiet
places in nature so that they might be in the right place at the
right time.
The author grew up in Potomac, MD and has a Bachelor’s Degree in
Environmental Sciences from Northwestern University and a PhD in
Biology from The Ohio State University. He worked as a seasonal field
biologist for several years throughout the United States, working
mostly with birds. He currently resides with his girlfriend and cat
in Columbus, OH and is a professor of Human and Anatomy and
Physiology at a small college. He enjoys hiking, camping, and
backpacking and anything that involves being outdoors and observing
wildlife. He is the author of multiple scientific papers but has
never been published as a creative writer.
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