To my great surprise within the hour a little bird teetering and pulsing up on the power line along our county road proved to be a swallow, rather scruffy, with the unmistakable huge primaries out behind. I was thinking 'tree swallow' at first given normal arrivals in a traditional spring, but spoke to the bird and walked up under it, causing it to turn around and face me, revealing the dark orange throat and beginnings of a fork in the tail. Coloration along the flanks was not clean but brownish, fading onto a white breast and belly, no warm coloration. The ends of the secondaries bore a wide grey bar and there was a grayish collar along the back of the neck a bit like the marking on a cliff swallow. When it flew the forked tail was even more apparent.
Pussy willows were in bud along the deep water of the ditch down the road. *Tanya Beyer* http://www.epiphaniesafield.com/home-page.html ---- Join or Leave mou-net: http://lists.umn.edu/cgi-bin/wa?SUBED1=mou-net Archives: http://lists.umn.edu/archives/mou-net.html
