A 19-year connection with a family of swallows looked to be broken in the early spring when I found the nest they had used year after year wrecked by vandals.
The mud-cup nest rested on a roof beam within one of the BBQ shelters at the Waterworks Reserve and over time the family building it each year had survived trials and tribulations – storm and tempest and human disturbance – to always produce young.
This year all seemed to be going to plan, even if the remains of last year’s nest providing a foundation for a new one had been cleared away by workers doing maintenance work on the hut, and its roof, over winter.
Soon after noting the welcome swallows’ arrival in the first weeks of September, I also saw them gathering beakfulls of mud from a puddle draining into one of the reservoirs at the reserve, and the nest taking shape, anchored as usual to the same cross-beam.
I counted down the weeks, expecting the female to incubate eggs and then feed young in the nest. However, when I found time to visit to check on progress, the nest had been destroyed and its dried-mud remnants could be seen on the floor of the BBQ hut.
Worse, the family of swallows which hawk insects over the grassy reservoir embankments were nowhere to be see.
I had reconciled myself to not seeing young swallows being taught to fly this season, as I had seen in the past, and the swallows possibly not returning to nest in the coming one.
That was until I heard that another family of swallows had scouted out the hut as a possible nesting site, and built a new home on an adjoining beam.
A member of the City of Hobart Bush Adventures staff who, like myself, has observed the swallows over the years reported that she suspected it was a new family and not the previous one because they appeared more skittish and not as trusting as the others. Instead of coming and going to the hut when it was in use at weekends, the swallows tended to keep their distance for the few hours it was occupied, or at least visit less frequently to feed nestlings.
There were three young and I am happy to report they all safely left the nest. After being taught to fly and chase insects, they were soon joining their parents on hunting forays over the twin reservoirs. And they are now in the process of following their parents on migration to the mainland.
Swallows tend to return to the same nest each year. The members of what I believe have been successive families over nearly two decades may now have made way for a different blood line but at least I’m guaranteed of continuing my connection with swallows when these masters of flight, and their smaller cousins, the tree martins, return to the reserve in September.