Barn Swallow
Hirundo rustica
Barn Swallow · Staten Island · 5 July 2026
A Barn Swallow on Staten Island in July, the most widespread swallow in the world, breeding across most of the Northern Hemisphere and wintering as far south as Argentina and South Africa.
Chestnut forehead and throat, steel-blue back, a deeply forked tail. It is one of the clearest cases of a wild bird moving in with people: nearly every Barn Swallow nest in North America now is a mud cup glued to a beam, eave or bridge rather than the cliff ledges the species used before humans built anything worth using instead.
Birds, insects, plants and other wildlife, mostly from Brooklyn, with some from further afield.
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