Grudging welcome for Seattle swallows
City removes barrier to nests at park
By JANE HADLEY
SEATTLE POST-INTELLIGENCER REPORTER
Every March 19, when the cliff swallows are reputed to return like clockwork
to San Juan Capistrano, they're welcomed by a town fiesta, complete with
mariachi bands, crowds of tourists and the Swallows Day Parade.
When the small band of cliff swallows that has been calling Seattle home for
many years hit town in April, they got a different kind of greeting.
They found their nests gone and netting on the wall of Warren G. Magnuson
Park Building 27 designed to prevent them from making new ones. Seattle
Parks and Recreation was concerned about cleanliness, spokeswoman Dewey
Potter says.
But after protests from local fans of the cliff swallows, the park
department recently took down the netting and said it will no longer try to
discourage the cliff swallows of Magnuson Park.
"That's great," says Lynn Ferguson, an amateur birder who visits the park
about three times a week.
Ferguson sees it as the Seattle version of New York City's Pale Male and
Lola story. Managers of a celebrity-filled Fifth Avenue apartment building
in early December dismantled a red-tailed hawk nest but backtracked a week
later after protests from fans of the birds, Pale Male and his mate, Lola.
"After Pale Male was in the papers, they took down the netting," Ferguson
says of Seattle's park department. "I thought that was a response to their
understanding that people care about urban wildlife."
Potter says it's a question of balancing the needs of the birds with the
active use of the building.
"One problem with nests that sit year after year in the same place is that
they harbor mites, and the birds themselves will leave them if they get into
that condition."

But Ferguson says while the mites in the nests can be a problem for the
birds, they are not a problem for people. She says each adult swallow eats
hundreds of mosquitoes a day and will prove a benefit in fighting off the
West Nile virus, which is borne by mosquitoes.
Building 27 is a large, usually empty former hangar in the north end of the
park. It's used for about a dozen special events a year, such as craft sales
and the library's book sale, Potter says.
The cliff swallows winter in Brazil, Paraguay and Argentina and have been
flying thousands of miles to Magnuson Park the third week of April for at
least the past 15 or 20 years, Ferguson says.
"You set your calendar for when they come," says Bonnie Miller, another
neighborhood resident who walks in the park daily.
The birds reoccupy their nests and then hatch and raise young over the
summer, leaving in fall. Last year, there were about 100 nests, Ferguson
says. That's a small colony, and Ferguson says it's the only one she's aware
of in Seattle.
"It's part of the allure of Magnuson Park that we do have migratory birds
there," Miller says -- "being in the middle of the city and feeling like
you're not in the middle of the city."
Miller took water to the park during a dry year to create mud near nest
sites. "I'd dump the water in the holes and I'd drive away, sit there and
watch them swoop," she says.
"They are beautiful fliers," Ferguson says. "They're fun, too, because they
build their nests a beakful of mud at a time. You can watch them make their
structures."
Cliff swallows are on the increase in the United States, helped by manmade
structures such as bridges, culverts and eaves, where they build their
gourd-shaped nests.
Some of the swallows were able to move through the netting on the building
in April and nest on the side of the wall, while others moved down to a part
of the building without netting.
Miller and Ferguson spent part of a day washing the hangar wall in September
after the birds left for South America. They said they discovered that most
of the excrement on the wall came from pigeons.
This April, there will be no netting, and the birds will be allowed to nest,
Potter says, but the department will need to clean that visible side of the
building periodically.
"We hope that arrangement will be satisfactory for everyone," Potter says.
Removing nests annually would be a hardship on the swallows that would
likely discourage them, Ferguson says.
The swallows usually reuse the same nests year after year, but on some
occasions rebuild them if they've been damaged by a storm or change
locations in order to let the mites and other parasites in an old nest die
off.
"We want to make it work for the birds," says Potter.
Ferguson hails the department's change of direction as "a real positive."
She hopes to work with the department and the Seattle Audubon Society to set
up an educational event and celebration in April of the swallows' return to
Magnuson.