Could you give the dates, please? Thanks.
2. If the date is appropriate, it's a juvenile.
Apologies about the dates - Butty is right, I should have been explicit.
If you hover over the photo with your cursor, then the file name includes the dates. It's so automatic with me that I forget others will not realise - every photo I file at home has a unique number ID - YYMMDDxxx and also a location word (occasionally a not-location word). (Sometimes I post edited photos on BF for illustration purposes which do not follow this rule, especially when replying to others' queries). Basically, since digital photography started, all of the thousands of photos I have taken can be put in time order simply by ordering them by filename; and they also have a bunch of keywords attached to the file as well as being in one or more of my iView Media Pro catalogues.
The first photo above (Post #3) is 200601 - i.e 1st June 2020
All the others are 170810 - i.e. 10th August 2017 (and all taken within a few minutes of each other)
'Nara Ponds' is my local spot. 'Home' in this case means I could have taken that photo from the desk where I am typing this.
Barn Swallows in Japan usually make nests on overhangs on houses and other buildings. Instead of knocking them down because of the mess, people, shops, and even large department stores put cardboard boxes below the nests to catch the 'overflow' and people think it normal to walk around these for two or three months of the year. It's one of the neat things about this country (I'm not saying all things are 'neat' but some are).
When I first came to Japan, I was surprised. But I was told that many people regard it as lucky if a Swallow family chooses them. And as to why the Swallows breed a few tens of centimetres from people was explained to me as that the Swallows have realised that people are no threat, and indeed that their nests are more likely to be safe from snakes and other problems if they are near humans. Having said that, the birds I can see from my window (who seem to do two broods a year) have lost at least two broods to Crows over the last three years.
A thing that was strange about the day of my above photos (post #3) - 10th August 2017 - is that there seemed to be just one or two individuals of each type that I have posted - i.e I haven't selected a few odd birds from a huge group - which makes me think more that there was something special about this group being in this spot on that day (e.g. a special migration). I've never seen this collection before or since.
The bird that Butty thinks will be a juvenile was by itself - i.e. there were no (other) local Barn Swallows, which in my experience would be strange for a juvenile at that season. If you look at the back of the bird, it has dropped a lot of back feathers - rather than a juvenile, I wondered if it might be sick. But apart from the back, it looked OK, so...
In addition to the birds I posted above, there were a couple of Red-rumped Swallows (posted below) on those wires - again this is strange, because the Red-rumped which breed in our area (the closest spot I know is about 20km away) come through at a different time, and there are often a lot of them on the way in in May and the way out in mid- to late- September.
So Mid- August for all of these birds is a bit odd.
And Alex's comment on this thread prompted me to post.
I'm not even sure that
saturata and
rustica are real things. So, comments and criticism welcome.
And best wishes for the New Year to both Butty and Alex. I hope the three of us will continue the productive interaction we have had on BIrd Forum over the last few years.
MacNara
