Family-Outdoors

Spring is coming to the Midwest and so are hundreds of thousands of birds looking for a summer home. Bank swallows - the smallest swallows in North America - are among them and they are actively looking for places to nest and raise their young. You can help protect these gregarious birds by keeping an eye out for their nesting colonies across the region. Bank swallows live in low areas along rivers, streams or reservoirs. Their territories usually include vertical cliffs or banks. Though in the past, bank swallows were most commonly found around natural bluffs or eroding streamside banks, more and more often these swallows populate human-made sites, such as road banks, construction sites and landscaping borrow sites. Social and always active, these small brown and white birds nest in colonies sometimes numbering in the thousands and quickly colonize these sites before landowners may realize. Under the Migratory Bird Treaty Act, bank swallows and their nesting sites are...