
Inside Ontario’s fight to save declining barn swallows, one bird house at a time
TOWNSEND, Ont. — The long grass sways as a soft summer wind sweeps under two strange structures, blowing with it the faint smell of manure, in an otherwise empty Ontario field. Under one, which looks like a tiny house on stilts, Myles Falconer carefully removes five barn swallow chicks from their nest to have them weighed, measured and banded.
“The chicks are too young to get ornery,” Falconer says as he handles the tiny songbirds, “but we wouldn’t want to do this in a few weeks.”
The biologist is part of a small team with Bird Studies Canada that is researching barn swallows in an effort to understand why their population in Ontario has plummeted — down 65 per cent between 1966 and 2009, according to the provincial government.
No one really knows what’s causing the decline, but researchers suspect habitat loss for the small bird, the striking aerial insectivore with an iridescent steel-blue back, rusty red forehead and throat, and distinctive forked tails.