Watch the Masterful Flight of Tree Swallows: Wild Birds Revealed

[Russell Laman voiceover]: Tree Swallows are aerial acrobats, spending their days in constant motion. Swooping, gliding, and snatching insects mid-air with stunning agility.

To get a closer look at their amazing abilities, we followed them through the heart of nesting season, when life is at its busiest. Adults zip back and forth feeding hungry nestlings, while young swallows prepare for their first flight. With high-speed video and still photography, we’ve captured what’s usually a blur of wings and motion, and turned it into a perfectly precise moment in time.

We’re Russ and Tim Laman, wildlife filmmakers and photographers, on assignment for the Cornell Lab of Ornithology. And this is Wild Birds Revealed.

[voiceover]: OM SYSTEM offers birders and nature photographers lightweight, weather-sealed gear with strong image stabilization and powerful super-telephoto lenses…all built for handheld freedom to capture amazing moments. [Russell voiceover]: To capture great Tree Swallow footage, you have to keep your eyes on the sky…they’re in constant motion. [Tim Laman onscreen]: These swallows are amazingly fast fliers so it’s going to be a real challenge but we are going to try to capture some stills of these birds in flight. [Russell voiceover]: For us, the challenge was not just keeping them in the frame, but catching that moment where the sunlight hits just right, turning their feathers into flashes of steel blue, and really getting a sense of what insects they’re catching.  

They catch almost anything that flies: tiny nymphs, to wasps, bees, dragonflies, moths…and much more.

[Tim onscreen]: Did I get it, I think I might have gotten it. [chuckles] These guys are fast. [Russell voiceover]: Swallows have super long, pointed wings that help them fly fast, like a falcon. But their broad base also gives them the agility to pivot instantly.

Compare that to an Eastern Bluebird—similar in size, but with shorter, rounder wings, built for maneuverability but not speed. 

Both birds are songbirds, but Tree Swallows have evolved a totally different wing shape to fit their aerial lifestyle.

[Tim onscreen]: Tree Swallows are cavity nesters and in many areas cavities are in limited supply so they take readily to nest boxes that we put out.

We have some made out of tree trunks that have a special window in the back that we can put a lens in to film from. And we also have some more traditional bird boxes made out of boards.

[Russell onscreen]: So this is the one we just built, and so we are going to attach it to this pole here and then check up on it and hopefully in a few weeks we’re gong to get some swallows nesting in it. [Russell voiceover]: Sure enough, when we came back a few weeks later, there were chicks in the nest!!

Tree Swallows feed their nestlings up to 7,000 insects per day. Parents work from dawn to dusk, snatching prey on the wing, then diving to the nest box to deliver the goods.

It’s a rhythm of flight, feed, repeat during the intense 3-week period between hatching and fledging.

[Tim onscreen]: Today several chicks have fledged from this nest box, and this might be one of the last ones. He’s hesitating, he’s waiting in the nest opening there. Oh he’s kind of getting excited right now popping his head out into the opening. And the parents have not been feeding much this morning. I think they are encouraging the chicks to come out by reducing the feedings.

And it’s pretty cool to be here and get a chance to… Oh, he just got a little bite there…that’s not going to encourage them to come out. [laughs] [Russell voiceover]: And the little hatchling stays put for now…I guess the parents were doing too good of a job at keeping it fed. But in the coming days we got to witness swallows both old and young beginning to group up.

These young brown swallows may be only a few days out of the nest but amazingly, they’re already expert fliers able to catch insects on their own. 

Outside of the breeding season, Tree Swallows are incredibly social birds. By mid-August, they’ll be starting to join up into flocks, some numbering in the hundreds of thousands, and head off to wintering sites as far south as Panama.

Capturing this story was about patience and speed—anticipating the flight path, and being ready when the action unfolds.

Because when you slow down and watch swallows closely, you realize—this is a whole other world, playing out in midair.

[Tim onscreen]: Thanks for tuning in to Wild Birds Revealed. Be sure to check out our other episodes on the Cornell Lab YouTube Channel, and the All About Birds Website. [Russell onscreen]: You never know what you are going to see when you spend time with birds.

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