. Birds through the year . er the glass roof of a stationplatform, the nest may be so flat and widely open at thetop that it might almost be taken for a swallows. Thoughcolonies of house-martins nests are not very uncommon ontall cliffs, both inland and by the sea, swallows nests are veryrarely indeed found in caves, though the habit in England is notyet quite extinct. Swallows are less gregarious than martinsin the wild state ; and this characteristic is preserved in their *5° SPRING half-domesticated life. A single martins nest is the exceptionon any house, and when there is only one, this i
. Birds through the year . er the glass roof of a stationplatform, the nest may be so flat and widely open at thetop that it might almost be taken for a swallows. Thoughcolonies of house-martins nests are not very uncommon ontall cliffs, both inland and by the sea, swallows nests are veryrarely indeed found in caves, though the habit in England is notyet quite extinct. Swallows are less gregarious than martinsin the wild state ; and this characteristic is preserved in their *5° SPRING half-domesticated life. A single martins nest is the exceptionon any house, and when there is only one, this isolation cangenerally be traced to persecution by sparrows, or to springstorms which decreased the birds numbers. But one pair ofswallows will often settle in some lonely byre; and theyseldom or never build a cluster of two or more nests, as themartins do. The differences of the nesting-sites are reflected,as is generally the case, in the colour of the eggs. Swifts,house-martins, and sand-martins lay pure white eggs, like. SAND-MARTINS most birds which incubate in a deep and sheltered hole. Theartificial cavity of the house-martins nest gives the sameprotection as the holes burrowed by the sand-martin, and thecrevices frequented by the swift. But the eggs of the swalloware well spotted with dusky red, and thus conform to the generalscale of density in marking which characterises eggs laid inopen nests, but not so excessively exposed as to need ahighly protective pattern. The insecurity of the swallowseggs as compared with those of its relations is shown inanother way. It would be quite impossible for a cuckoo to SWALLOWS AND SWIFTS 151 place her egg in a sand-martins nest, and very difficult forher to get it unbroken into a house-martins ; but it is notvery rare for a swallows nest to harbour a cuckoo, thoughthe swallow is not one of the cuckoos usual victims. Our British swallows and swifts spend the winter in variousparts of tropical and southern Africa ; some of them alsooc
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Keywords: ., bookcentury1900, bookdecade1920, booksubjectbirdspi, bookyear1922
