Returning The Baby Barn Swallow To Her Nest

It’s not true that you can’t put a baby bird back in its nest, that the parent won’t accept it.

For years I’ve found baby barn swallows on the ground in the pole barn and put them back in the nest and don’t find them back on the ground the next day.

I know to watch for baby barn swallows on the ground this time of year.  They’re hard to see, they blend in with the hard packed earth, look like just another donkey plop.

The baby barn swallow I found today was close to the barn wall.  I knew the babies had hatched  in that nest because I found a white,  brown speckled broken egg shell under the nest.

I felt the thin claws of the baby birds feet clutch the palm of my hand as I held her in my palm.  So young yet already with the urge to roost.  A good sign I thought.  She was the  size of a golf ball with fluff for feathers and eyes not yet open.

The baby bird sat in my hand as I opened the barn gate, got the ladder and opened it up under the nest, all with one hand.

The nest was too high up for me to see into, but close enough for me to reach my hand up and place the baby bird back in the nest.

When I did, her siblings began to a tiny chorus of chirps, maybe thinking someone was there to feed them.

Now, whenever I pick up a baby bird, I think of the mites that are inevitable on them and then also on me.  I rubbed my hands together and washed them with hose, careful not to touch my face.  I know that feeling of mites on my face, as if I’d walked through a spiders webs, too well.

I wondered when I left the barn is the barn swallows who were now flying very close,  knew what I had done.  If it would make them trust me a bit more.

Not that it matters. I don’t need them to accept me.  It makes me happy every year when they come back, make their nests in the barn and hatch their young.

That’s more than enough for me.

A barn swallow egg.  As small as the baby barn swallow is that I returned to the nest, the egg it hatched from is even so much smaller.