Given that the house had been empty for so long we weren't sure if they would be back in the summer, but we were hopeful.
Flash forward 5 months to September. I'm out in the braai and a small bird flies right under the balcony and hovers for a fraction of a second then flies away again. A few minutes later the same thing. I was so excited that I grabbed my phone for a quick video.
It went on like this for weeks. Birds, we thought 4 of them, would do a low fly in, hover in various spots under the balcony and fly off again. I set up my camera trying to get a good shot so I could identify what kind of bird they were.
Not a great shot, but we were able to identify them as lesser striped swallows.
After about 3 weeks we found this on the wall.
Just a few splotches of something and some peck marks that were the same shape as the nests we had seen when we moved in. It was like they had drawn a blueprint on the wall. Cool.
After weeks of flying and hovering they had started building. They were partially through the first nest and it was accidentally knocked off by a worker. They started again in the exact same spot. That one fell down too. They started a third time but moved the nest over about 10cm. It took about 1 1/2 weeks to finish.
It was the most amazing thing I have ever seen. They would fly up with their mouths so full of mud that they couldn't even close their beaks. They must have had it all the way down to their gullet because when they started to cough it up onto the nest I couldn't believe how much was in there. Here is a photo of them in the building process.
I won't bore you with all the photos, I took several every day to document their progress :) This was the final product.
You can see, to the bottom left, the mud stains from the first two tries. I found it so interesting that the mud is in different shades. Obviously from different locations. It made me wonder was the darker mud more like clay so the base of the nest is more sturdy? I have no idea, but I makes me appreciate mother nature even more than I ever did.
Just before we left for Canada we thought that the eggs must have been laid. We were sad that we would miss the hatching, but looked forward to coming back to PE to see the little swallows.
Sure enough when we came back there were 4 little ones already fledged and flying around. Here are 3 of them are perched on our back door.
Not long after we got home I opened up the accordion doors to the back yard. It really opens up the whole back wall of the lounge area to the outside. Well the poor little baby swallows over shot the nest, got confused and did a bit of a tour of the house. The kids were squealing and one poor little swallow couldn't figure out how to get itself out. It was exhausted from flying at the window so I had to help it by scooping it up on a soft broom and lifting it out the window above. What an adventure for the kids.
I had wondered how many eggs a swallow would lay and I had assumed 4 until a week or so ago. I guess they had been running out of space in the nest for the 6 of them because I found a dead hatchling at the backdoor. It obviously didn't survive very long from the looks of it's tiny featherless body. So this pair laid 5 eggs and 4 survived.
It is March now and we haven't seen the swallows for a few days, so maybe they have started their migration North.
I look forward to watching it all unfold again next year and hopefully we'll be around to hear and see the chicks when they first hatch.
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