Hi all,

Here?s hoping people will put out mud for Barn Swallows if they live in upland residential areas and are in a position to do this. It?s really getting dry now and putting out mud solves one problem for this bird, which in my opinion is declining in town here.

I use a scrap of butyl to put the mud in (available at Oasis Water Garden store on Brandon in South Seattle) and add water almost every day. Our Barn Swallows are about to fledge and I?m only keeping our mud wet now on the possibility that other swallows are probably building now and would venture into a neighbor?s territory for mud, which may or may not be true.
Robins also appreciate a good mud source.

(Really appreciated recent posts by Kelly Cassidy and Kurt Ranta. The Nighthawk was definitely more common here in recent times and any and all Nighthawk sightings should make their way to Tweeters. The Nighthawk?s is not an extirpation that can be solely attributed to habitat destruction, since they used to live in the Central Business District as well as established neighborhoods and no longer do. Crow nest predation, which is connected to but not the same thing as habitat destruction, begs to be considered as a likely hypothesis here. )

Ed Newbold newboldwildlife at netscape.net residential Beacon Hill, Seattle Tweeter by digest.


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