Rewilding My Lot

There has been some traumatic event at the barn swallow nest, which now appears to be abandoned. Here’s where I wish I had installed a camera to watch it so I’d have more information. As it is, I can only look at the evidence and deduce a hypothesis.

Here’s a timeline:

In the last part of March 2025, a pair of Barn Swallows appeared to be checking us out. They would sleep on the porch rafters. If we appeared in the porch to pass through or sit for a while, they might move away at first but they returned soon afterwards.

Apparently we were deemed safe because a few days later they started to build a nest.

By March 30, the nest was apparently complete and the female began to sit on it most of the time. The male was usually nearby. I presume that there were eggs at that point.

On April 11, I acquired a mirror on a stick and confirmed that there were four eggs in the nest. (The incubation period should be 12-17 days.)

On April 19 there were still four eggs in the nest and the female was regularly sitting on them.

On April 20 overnight, something catastrophic happened. In the morning of April 21 the nest appeared to be disturbed. Feathers were cascading out of it and there was one broken egg (half of the shell on the edge of the nest and half below with visible yolk). I picked four feathers off the ground nearby.

That morning there was a pair of agitated Barn Swallows swooping in and out of our porch and “arguing” above the nearby garage door. After that morning, we didn’t see them again.

With the mirror, the nest appeared full of feathers but I couldn’t see if there were still eggs in there. After two days of not seeing the parents I climbed a ladder to take a closer look, carefully lifting the feathers with a stick to peek underneath. Apart from the broken shell, I saw no eggs. The state of the feathers in the nest were consistent with a disturbance of what had originally been underneath the eggs. (They look like they might be Barn Swallow body feathers, so I wonder if they plucked a few from themselves to line their nest when they built it.)

So what happened?

My hypothesis is that some creature climbed or flew to the nest during the night, scared off the parents, stole three of the eggs, and broke the fourth. The parents stayed in the vicinity for a few hours the morning after this event, but then left to start again somewhere new.

To my knowledge I haven’t seen anything here that would do such a thing so I have no idea what it might have been. I had considered installing a camera to watch the nest. However, if so, I wasn’t planning to do that until confirming that the swallows would return in subsequent years, so it wasn’t going to happen this year. So at this point I’ll never know what happened.