Swallows in the city
Barn swallows are awesome little critters. So fast and agile! And also great example of animal thriving in close vicinity to the humans. You can often observe swallows nesting on human buildings from city houses to rural cottages and barns (hence the name). As a matter of fact, I see them almost every day on my way to work in historical downtown of the city and wanted to photograph them for over a year.
However, it took me a while, because it is quite awkward to wander in the city streets with huge telephoto lens, which attracts unwanted attention of people passing by. It is also not so easy to actually take a picture of them, since it is not in nature of a regular swallow to stand still and pose for photograph. Even in their nest they tend to hop around a lot, which leads to need to really bump up the shutter speed and try to anticipate their movement. Feeding of the chicks takes just a couple of seconds and then the caring parent swiftly leaves for another hunting round. No time to waste (for both of us)! I took these pictures in České Budějovice, where I could locate several nests. Photos without chicks were taken at the beginning of May and photos with younglings are from second half of June.
I have to admit that I really underexposed bunch of pictures in the process. To avoid motion blur I kept shutter speed fairly high (1/1000th of the second, which is shutter speed I usually use for small perched birds). Due to that and less than ideal light conditions in a shadowy corner I ended up with lots of noisy photos, but luckily few of them looked fine enough to show.
Tip of the day: don’t confuse barn swallow with common house martin, like I used to do. Especially while they are airborne and move fast they could look very similar, but unlike martin the swallow has a extended pointy tail (like two long antenas comming from it). The martin’s tail looks more like an arrow. They also build a different kind of nest. Swallow’s nest looks like a bowl, meanwhile martin builds kind of “reversed igloo“ glued to the upper corner of the wall.
