Bernd Heinrich - White Feathers

Copyright 2020 by Bernd Heinrich

Photographs and illustrations 2020 by Bernd Heinrich

All rights reserved

For information about permission to reproduce selections from this book, write to or to Permissions, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company, 3 Park Avenue, 19th Floor, New York, New York 10016.

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Heinrich, Bernd, 1940 author, illustrator.

Title: White feathers : the nesting lives of tree swallows / Bernd Heinrich.

Description: Boston : Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2020. | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2019024927 (print) | LCCN 2019024928 (ebook) | ISBN 9781328604415 (hardcover) | ISBN 9781328603517 (ebook) | ISBN 9780358172338 | ISBN 9780358306887

Subjects: LCSH : Tree swallow. | Tree swallowNests.

Classification: LCC QL 696. P 247 H 45 2020 (print) | LCC QL 696. P 247 (ebook) | DDC 598.8/26dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019024927

LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019024928

Cover design by Martha Kennedy

Cover illustration and photography Bernd Heinrich

Author photograph Kyle Isherwood

v1.0120

Not to be confined by the greatest, yet to be contained within the smallest, is divine.

Epitaph of St. Ignatius (14911556)

I was walking across our compound last month when a queen termite began building her miraculous city. I saw it because I looked down. One night three great fruit bats flew over the face of the moon. I saw it because I looked up.

William Beebe (18771962)

I thank Ted Simanek for building my nest-boxes to swallow-friendly specifications, and I thank him and Betty Simanek, as well as Linda Bean and Nancy and Richard Stowell, for allowing me to distribute them over their fields. Willem Hillier too for aerial pictures of the study area with a drone. Nathanial T. Wheelwright, Margaret McVey, Liam Taylor, Sandra Mitchell, and Paul R. Spitzer shared observations of other swallows, and Margaret McVey made helpful comments and suggestions on the manuscript. Special thanks to Lynn Jennings for her patience and understanding of my long and frequent absences, not only during my observations of the swallows in the field, but during continuing entanglement afterward. I might not have done it with as much abandon but for the thought that she would always still be there, and I am sorry for unanticipated costs incurred. As always, I greatly appreciate the staff at Houghton Mifflin Harcourt and their faith in me, and this project. I especially thank Deanne Urmy and Susanna Brougham for their careful reading, excellent suggestions, and patience.

There is arguably no bird in the world that combines graceful flight, beauty of feathers, pleasing song, and accessibility, plus tameness and abundance, more than the tree swallows (Tachycineta bicolor). And just by putting up a nest-box made in minutes from some scrap board and placed on a pole, I had a pair nesting by my door. In early May 2008, I happened to peek into the nest-box and saw five snow-white eggs in a bed of long white feathers. I had peeked into nest-boxes before and seen nest linings of various commonly available materials, but never anything like this. It was no flukesuch white feathers are rare, and it had cost the swallows deliberate effort to search for and acquire them.

Not surprisingly, swallows are among the most studied birds, and the tree swallow has been considered a model bird for research, as the fruit fly (Drosophila melanogaster) and the house mouse (Mus musculus) are to genetics, and the Norway rat (Rattus norvegicus) is to animal behavior. In the many hundreds of scientific studies of tree swallows, the most common topic is their mating behavior. But when I wanted to find out why they line their nests with white feathers, there was nothing in the literature. I had little interest in the mating behavior of tree swallows, but why they went to the effort of finding white feathers was an intriguing question. Would this behavior be repeated by the pair near my door, or by other pairs, or at another place? No answers to these questions were readily available, and I was sure that many more unknowns were linked to them.

The species is distributed all over North America. Originally tree swallows nested only in tree holes, in contrast to the perhaps more familiar barn and cliff swallows, which build their own type of birdhouse by plastering one gobbet of mud at a time onto a solid substrate to make a potlike cavity, and there they nest. Theirs is a wonderfully creative and beautiful innovation, which allows them to pitch their house potentially anywhere with a convenient solid surface, such as a barn beam or a cliff face. They can nest directly next to each other, and sometimes even on top of each other, thus sharing walls and saving construction costs. As many as fifty cliff-swallow nests may be found in a square meter. In contrast, tree swallows are normally solitary during nesting time. They nest in holes made by woodpeckers, and since woodpeckers are territorial, commanding a certain area as their own, these nesting sites are widely distributed.

But we can bring tree swallows closer to us. By providing them with substitutesready-made nest-boxeswell find them nesting right in front of us, in plain view. Their bubbly songs and lively activities are reminders of lifes beauty and bounty, and sometimes their presence provides the opportunity for close study.

Henry David Thoreau famously claimed that a closely examined life would yield infinite riches. He meant our individual lives. But why not consider others? Birds live by needs, means, and constraints similar to our own. Like us, they claim and settle in a neighborhood, secure food, court a mate, build a home, raise their young, and avoid the dangers that could imperil their own lives and those of their offspring. The details of how they accomplish those universal tasks in their world might offer perspective on and insight into our own lives. Ordinarily we barely glance at swallows; I wanted to watch them deliberately and get to know them intimately.

As you will see, I have attempted, with as little interference as possible, to follow the life cycle of one pair of tree swallows per nesting season. Occasionally, prompted by my observations, I explore wider topics. This differs from the much-practiced method of studying large numbers of birds at a time. My focus is on the detailed observation of individuals, and I have included both drawings and photographs so readers may take this journey with me through ten nesting seasons marked by repetition and variation. My hope is to present an intimate view of the nesting life of a fascinating species.

In 2010, while living in Vermont, I often examined nest-boxes being used by various pairs of birdshouse wrens, great crested flycatchers, European starlings, black-capped chickadees, and tree swallows. The swallows had won out over a pair of chickadees in a contest for the same box, and they furnished the nest with white feathers but, curiously, did so only after their eggs had been laidnot before, as per usual avian protocol.

The female began incubating her six eggs on May 28, 2010, and the nest eventually contained 110 white feathers. The eggs hatched on June 8, and by the 24th the young were feathered out in their ash-gray garb. At that point the nestlings were clambering up from the bottom of the nest to perch, one at a time, in the nest-box entrance hole. There they intercepted each parent as it brought food, fluttering up to its offspring, sometimes hardly stopping. The adult bird simply passed off the food while on the wing.