Animal · Germany, France, United Kingdom
Barn swallow
Hirundo rustica — the name this animal has in the language scientists everywhere share.
The barn swallow is a fast blue and white bird with a deeply forked tail that builds its nest of mud inside barns and open sheds. It catches insects on the wing, never on the ground. In autumn it flies all the way to Africa.
Picture credit: Yerpo (CC BY-SA 4.0) · Andreas Trepte (CC BY-SA 2.5) · Jembewiki (CC BY-SA 4.0) · Wikimedia Commons
Where does the barn swallow live?
Home: farmland, villages and open country.
In the wild it lives in these countries: Germany, France, the United Kingdom, Spain, Italy, Poland, the United States, South Africa.
Conservation status from the IUCN: not in danger.
The short profile
Fully grown: about 18 cm long including the tail streamers. It weighs about 0 019 kilograms. On the menu: insects.
The story behind it
Barn swallows catch almost everything they eat in the air, swooping low over meadows and ponds after flies and other small insects. Their mouths open very wide and they simply fly through the swarm with the bill open. A pair builds a cup of mud on a beam or ledge, carrying up to about a thousand tiny pellets of wet earth mixed with grass, and lines it with feathers. Usually four or five eggs are laid, and many pairs raise two broods in a summer. In autumn the swallows of Europe cross the Sahara to Africa, a journey of more than 10 000 km in a year. They return in spring, and ringed birds often come back to the very barn where they hatched. Because they hunt insects over farms, swallows do best where there are animals, open doorways and puddles of mud.
Find it on the globe
Barn swallow is there as a tiny animated figure that breathes and looks around. From far away the planet is only a blue ball; detail arrives as you zoom in, and this one appears once you are close enough. Open it on the globe.
It sits at its real coordinates, not near them — the same numbers listed in the facts above. Switch off the layer for this kind of place and it disappears again; the buttons for that are down the right-hand edge.
Questions children ask
How do swallows find the way to Africa?
Young birds start out with an inherited sense of direction and use the sun, the stars and the earth's magnetic field. With every trip they learn landmarks, so older swallows navigate better than first-year birds.
What happens if it rains for days?
Insects stop flying, and swallows may go hungry or move to sheltered water where midges still hatch. A long cold spell in spring can kill many birds, which is why they arrive late in cold years.
Why is the tail so long?
The outer feathers work like a rudder and help the bird turn sharply after insects. Females also prefer males with long, even streamers, so the longest tails belong to the healthiest birds.
Where these numbers come from
Every figure on this page was checked against public reference sources before publication. Where sources genuinely disagree, the text says so.
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