Hi Tweets,

I had intended to respond to this earlier, sorry for delay.

Sandy NcRuer writes:

>Having just got back from my breeding bird survey and being dissappointed
>in finding no swallows, I thought I'd look into it. Come to think of it I
>have seen very few swallows this year. They seemed to show up on time and
>then slowly dissapeared. I asked a birding buddy about it today and he
>agreed. He added another thoughtful comment. Perhaps with all the cold
>weather there are fewer bugs for them to feed on. So they arrived and
>starved. He just came back to Vancouver Island from a trip to the southern
>Cariboo and noted that the bugs weren't bad at all. Has any one else
>noticed this? Or am I as usual out to lunch?

In Vancouver and Richmond BC--actually in Kitsilano where I live and sort-of
central Richmond where I work, the swallows are uncommon at best, absent at
worst, in areas where in a normal spring or summer they're common. The usual
breeding pairs around the neighborhood are absent, the many swallows I saw
in our part of Richmond last summer have simply not appeared this year.

The few that I've seen this non-summer are often either unusually high,
suggesting that there's a very low hatch rate of insects from the sodden
ground this year, or swarming around a particular tree where there's a
hatch. A fellow-commuter says there's often a crowd around her West-End
apartment, but high-rise apartments are usually bug-traps in any weather.

On the principle that one man's ceiling is another man's floor, the swifts
have been unusually visible this summer, particularly when--as tonight--the
cloud-deck is very low and the rain driving the insects low. Each evening
sees as many as 100 Black Swifts Cypseloides niger over Kits--particularly
along Bayswater and Balaclava Sts where there's some really big elms--often
with a few Vaux's Swifts Chaetura vauxi at the edges. Tonight it was cool to
see a single Black Swift strafing straight down Broadway barely above the
trolley-wires of the busses. I can't get over how much like tiny shearwaters
they look.

This may be re-inventing the wheel, but I've noticed that in the lowlands,
Black Swifts enter an area in line abreast when they're prospecting and it's
only when they hook into a fairly good concentration of flying bugs that the
flock turns into a melee that looks like a dogfight in the Korean War.

Michael Price
Vancouver BC Canada
mprice at mindlink.net