On or about June 23, 2024, I received a text message informing me that the cliff swallows had arrived at the BCC Campus for its semi-regular nesting season.

The 2023 construction work that dug up much of the main campus had reawakened a conversation I had with Dick Ferren.  A few years earlier, he stated that the loss of the mud source was the single most important factor in the demise of the cliff swallow colony at BCC.  When the campus was dug up initially, no way would any self respecting cliff swallow be nesting on the campus simply based on the amount of human disturbance that was abounding on the premises.   Then in late June through early and mid July, the rains came.  Suddenly there were an abundance of cliff swallows seemingly out of nowhere.  It would appear that Dick Ferren had a hypothesis I needed to test.

My initial thought was to get a couple of sleds and a furniture dolly.  I put the sled on the dolly, filled the sled with suitable soil doped with just the right amount of clay; added water, and Voila!  Mobile mud source was ready to deploy.  Naturally, the cliff swallows had other ideas.  They flew over the sled of mud, around the sled of mud, landed beside the sled of mud.  With the exception of 2 juvenile cliff swallows none of them actually landed in the sled of mud.  So I promptly emptied the sled and set up sandbags in front of the storm drain to prevent loss of the mud source.  I set up an area in total of  60 square feet and an average depth of 2 inches .  Because of competition with crows, starlings and house sparrows, the BCC campus would require at least two  or more 60 sq ft mud sources if the facility has any hope of maintaining this unusual summer nester longer term.   Later in the season, the nesting behavior of the cliff swallows becomes rather stealthy. The swallows sneak into their nests and the nestlings are so much quieter than in the earlier part of the season. For example, one of the nests located on  Hawthorne Hall that I initially thought had been abandoned, had indeed successfully fledged at least 2 nestlings.  Of the 8 nesting attempts on the BCC campus for the 2024 season 5 of the nests successfully fledged young. The cliff swallows have evidently taken on the BCC campus as an “Educational colony”.  The additional curriculum include:  Foraging 101, and 102, Nest Construction 101 , and the required  Nest Construction Lab.  I’ll need at least a few more years of testing the mud source viability, but preliminarily speaking, Ferren’s Hypothesis appears to be holding up.