On the way home yesterday I saw my first barn swallow darting around the Institute parking deck.  So never mind the spring equinox…spring arrived in Baltimore sometime yesterday afternoon, while I was busy in my ground floor office trying to figure out why my XML parser was validating a document that it should have failed.

When the swallows leave for the winter, their nesting spots are taken over by the local sparrows and house finches.  The house finches aren’t much of a problem, but sparrows are mean and aggressive as all hell.  They only seem like small birds.  Side by side you notice that they’re actually bigger then most of the the native songbirds.  My worry has been that if we get enough sparrows in the parking deck they’ll drive out the swallows.  But not to fear…it seems the first order of swallow business upon returning to their nesting grounds from South America is clearing out the sparrows.  When I saw my first swallow of the year it was chasing a sparrow for its dear life away from their nests. 

Swallows are tiny little things, but they’re fast and can turn on a dime in mid air and what I saw the other day is that sparrows are just no match for them in air combat.  I watched while that swallow fairly terrorized that sparrow in a high speed wheeling and hair pin turning chase up and down half the parking deck.  They zipped and turned and darted between parked cars and around the concrete columns like a couple bats out of hell, with the swallow loudly cussing and the sparrow completely terrorized until it finally, I’m not kidding, ducked under a parked car.  Then the swallow perched on one of the overhead fire sprinkler lines nearby and sassed it for a few minutes before flying off.  So I guess the swallows aren’t afraid of the sparrows.  If this year is anything like all the others, what will happen is the sparrows will move to a few isolated locations around the deck, perch on the deck railings during the day and sass the swallows as they fly in and out of their nests, and the swallows will just ignore them as long as they keep their distance.

Everything is green again.  The neighborhood trees are almost fully leafed now, and my bird feeders are suddenly getting a lot less traffic then they did in the winter.  My Spanish moss offering was picked over a little, but not much, so I guess the city birds aren’t really impressed with it as nest material, but I’ll leave it out for a couple months more.  I can walk to work in shirtsleeves most days now.  The swallows are back.  It’s spring now.