Slice of Life Tuesday: April 8th Is My Favorite Holiday

April 8th is my favorite holidays and as far as I know, we’re the only ones who celebrate it. April 8th is the day our tree swallows return to their nest box in the spring. I look forward to this holiday more than any other because it requires nothing of me except to witness an annual miracle.

We--my husband and I--look forward to it all year, as eager anticipation mingles with doubt. How can it be that these tiny acrobatic birds arrive on our porch exactly, precisely, on April 8th every year ready to nest?! Seven-tenths of an ounce, they fly thousands of miles through whatever mother nature throws at them to arrive here precisely at this moment. This exact point in the earth’s rotation around the sun, with the planet angled just so. How? And before we put up this nest box four years ago, where did they nest then? 

We had tree swallows on our previous porch, three miles away. We left that nest box, as we had to move before the chicks fledged. We had multiple offers on our house, not despite the fact that buyers had to dodge miniature tuxedoed missiles swooping at them as they attempted to get to the front door, but because of it. Buyers were charmed. Enchanted. Enthralled. Bewitched. They stood on the sidewalk, at a respectful distance, and watched as the  parents glided in graceful arcs, like they were attached with a tether anchored to the nest box itself. 

Although I’ve never seen them actually catch a bug, they return to the nest box dozens of times every hour with something to feed their chicks, and scientists say they only eat “bugs on the wing.” Once the chicks hatch, it is only at sunrise and sunset that one or the other sometimes vanishes for a long stretch. We imagine that they can’t resist the dusk insect bonanza at a nearby creek. 

On rainy days we worry ceaselessly. With the parents grounded, surely the chicks will starve. We have been known to leave dead bugs on the railing near the box, but the parents have never relented. The dead bugs don’t tempt them. Perhaps Colorado is the ideal place to be a tree swallow because rain seldom lasts a day before the sun is shining again. 

Each spring the bluebirds arrive several weeks before the tree swallows, and since they like the same nest boxes, we get lookie-loos. Visually-stunning, Mountain Bluebird couples check out our boxes and settle somewhere else. We don’t mind; we’re partial to tree swallows. 

Tree swallows are fierce. Battles for the nest box, likely between parent and offspring, or siblings, are loud and dizzying, as they swoop at and around each other, bob and weave, and sometimes even pounce, holding a rival down and pecking at it with a minuscule beak. They are relentlessly protective. If anything—crow, magpie, squirrel—dares to approach the nest, the parents team up to torment the aggressor. They chase it down, and aggressor transforms into the flinching victim of a fearless kamikaze. No creature comes back twice. 

My favorite author, Brian Doyle, writes of tree swallows in one of my favorite passages, in one of my favorite books, Mink River: “These things matter to me, Daniel, says the man with six days to live. They are sitting on the porch in the last light. These things matter to me, son. The way the hawks huddle their shoulders angrily against hissing snow. Wrens whirring in the bare bones of bushes in winter. The way swallows and swifts veer and whirl and swim and slice and carve and curve and swerve. The way that frozen dew outlines every blade of grass…” I hope you’ll look it up and read the rest of the passage. It’s on page 195. I am confident, Brian Doyle would have celebrated April 8th.