The architecture of birds / [Anon].

  • James Rennie
Date:
1831
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: The architecture of birds / [Anon]. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    With respect to the bank-swallows shifting their quarters, we have often remarked that it usually arises from their being disturbed. Daring boys find means of scaling the highest escarpment they can select; and still more frequently is their whole colony under- mined by the encroachment of a river or the opera- tions of digging and quarrying. Although, in such cases, they abandon their original site, they seldom go far to establish a new one. We have seen several instances, in which, from these causes, they had to remove almost every year. At Catrine in Ayrshire, there is a regular colony of bank-swallows, established in the alluvial sand lying over the sandstone of a small quarry ; and it has often happened that on their arrival in spring every hole of the previous summer has been demolished by the quarrymen. In this case they never begin their operations in the same place, but select another about the distance of a stone’s throw. When the face of the bank, thus selected, has proved too small for the population, though their galleries are so crowded as often to have scarcely three inches of partition, we have seen a small sub-colony of the supernumeraries established at fifty or a hundred yards off; but we have never observed an instance of a single pair of these birds living solitary and at a distance from their brethren, in the same manner that similar sub-colonies of rooks are often formed *. Comparing this fact with White’s remark, that “they seem not to be of a sociable turn—never (with us) congregating with their congeners in the au- tumn ”—we can hardly bring ourselves to believe that he meant the same species, or, at least, that he spoke in this instance from his own observation. posing the swallow-flea (Pulex Hirundinis, Stephens) to be the common bed-flea. 514 J. R.
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