Best Laid Plans
Almost exactly a year ago, a trip to Monterey was rescued by a barn swallow. I'd spent five fruitless hours on the ocean, hoping for whales and coming up empty, but a short walk around Moss Landing on the way home changed everything. I found a freshly fledged juvenile perched on a fence, a parent swooping in to deliver food against a soft blur of wildflowers, and I drove home with one of my favorite images of the year. You can read about that encounter here.
This weekend, the ocean foiled my plans again. But once again, a barn swallow (Hirundo rustica) was the hero.
The original idea was a family day at Point Reyes: sandcastles, sunbathing, and if I was lucky, some time with the western snowy plovers (Charadrius nivosus) that nest along the shore there. When we arrived, the wind had other ideas. Whitecaps covered the water, and gusts swept across the sand with enough force to make the afternoon genuinely miserable. We admitted defeat and headed to the visitor center.
It was there, tucked among the rafters above the courtyard, that I found my subject: a barn swallow nest, a sturdy cup of mud pellets reinforced with grass and lined with feathers. Five fluffy heads peered over the rim. Every few seconds, one of them opened a bright yellow mouth hopefully, then another, then all five at once.
Both parents were working flat out. Every few minutes, one would arrow in from above, deliver a payload of insects, and vanish again before the chicks had finished jostling for position. The pace was relentless. Each visit lasted barely a second, which made for a fun and genuinely challenging photography exercise: anticipate the approach, track the bird, hope the autofocus keeps up.
The highlight came when one of the parents arrived with a bug so large that the chicks simply couldn't manage it. It was dropped, retrieved, offered again, dropped once more, before finally disappearing down a small and very determined throat. The whole negotiation was absurd and completely riveting.
Over the many years I’ve been visiting Point Reyes National Seashore, I’ve learned it has a way of rewarding you when you’re flexible. Come for the beach, get blown off it, and end up watching one of nature's more chaotic feeding operations unfold a few feet above your head. For a plan B, I've had worse.
