Notice the birds

I’ve spent recent mornings in the barn, assembling honey supers for my beehives. The swallows are annoyed by my presence. And rightly so—baby birds fill their nests, some low enough for me to reach my hand into if I wanted to. The adults chatter and swoop, expressing their displeasure and attempting to run me off, or seemingly at times, to lure me away. When I’ve settled in to my methodical nail pounding or repeating brushstrokes, they calm down and monitor me, often taking up quiet positions back in nests or on crossbeams overhead. I’ll spend three or four hours at a time working, leaving completed supers outside on a tarp to dry. The swallows swoop out the barn door whenever I lay one of the completed hive boxes out.

In the early evening, we come back to the land from our current place in the village four miles away, to sit on what will soon be our south-facing deck, looking out at the mountains. We're as far away from the barns as you can get in the clustering of both broken-down and newly-built structures on our land. There we sit for an hour or more, drinking iced tea or sharing a beer, watching shadows form as the sun inches west, feeling for a short time how we might feel once we start waking up and going to sleep here in a few months.

The swallows are with us when we sit here, too. It’s prime time for them, as they circle and dive the meadows for insects: the mosquitoes, gnats and flies that they snatch out of the air.

Once we settle in our folding chairs on the exposed, elevated platform outside our unfinished house, some swallows break away from their feeding voyages to glide over the long length of the deck. They fly, not quite in formation, but just enough like a squadron--of threes, fours or sixes--that it is noticeable when two or five soar above the metal roof as one stays low to fly reconnaissance on us. Near enough to us that it does not seem random. We’re not threatening their young, or their food. We’re not close to their domestic spaces. I think they’re simply curious.

I’ve often wondered about animal curiosity, and wonder anew each time the swallows cruise us in the evenings. Carl Safina, animal researcher and author of Beyond Words: How Animals Think and Feel, tells us that animal curiosity is real:

The question really is, do other species have mental experiences or do they sense things without having any sensation of what they are experiencing? Like a motion sensor senses motion but it probably doesn’t experience that it senses motion. Animals do—they react to movement: fight or flight or curiosity.

Fight, flight or curiosity. That is essentially my experience with the barn swallows. Fight or flight is a concept we’re familiar with—one that renders animals in a deterministic manner—and one that seems evident each time I enter the barn, their intimate habitat. But what happens when I'm not an immediate threat?

Well, what is curiosity, anyway? In human terms, one way to describe it would be “asking questions and exploring answers.” Charan Ranganath, a researcher at UC Davis even thinks that curiosity may be evolutionary.

We might have a basic drive in our brain to fight uncertainty—the more we know about the world, the more likely we are to survive its many perils.

And why wouldn't this hold for animals, too? The swallows might ask: Who are you that have intruded in our hilltop world, and what are your intentions? They might even recognize us, and wonder, what we are doing now, after one of us was inside the barn--their home--earlier in the day? It is well-established that crows and other corvids remember individual humans, and understand cause and effect. Why not barn swallows?

Or maybe what looks like curiosity is part of the swallows' play. There must be joy in flight, even if it serves the primary purpose of sustenance, both for those swallows on the wing and for their unfledged broods. There's simply too much squawking and chirping during those evening flights out over the meadow to be entirely practical.

And in the few human studies on curiosity, play is associated. We work things out, learn things, through play. This is implicit in childhood. We don't really need the science to tell us this--though it is fascinating to know the details and the effects, empirically.

What if the swallows' long passes are part of a daredevil game? Fly at top speed toward the house and when you approach the peaked roof, see who goes high and who goes low. That seems like a lot of fun, all while keeping an eye on those wingless creatures down below.

My own curiosity has taught me a few things about the swallows. That, small as they are, they are mighty migrators--traveling as much as 12,000 miles to and fro each year. That North American swallows winter in South America. That they are a symbol of world travel. That, historically, tattoos of swallows are markers of miles covered at sea, every 5000 the occasion for new ink. That there is a cohort of swallows in South America that may be actively evolving, changing their migration and nesting patterning in our scientific lifetimes--something that birds just don't do, until now.

Perhaps most significantly, my observation of the swallows reminds me of the vividness of nature, a way that nature has of waking us up. Carl Safina says as much, too.

I’ve studied wild animals a lot and I’m always struck by how extremely alert they are and how well they sense what’s going on around them. They’re much more aware, compared to humans. Modern day humans go outside and don’t see, hear or sense very well. Our senses have dulled over thousands of years of civilization and settled living. I think that an animal’s experience of life is much sharper and clearer.

It’s not official that the swallows are cruising us out of curiosity, but I don’t need outside confirmation.

 As the poet Craig Arnold wrote as part of a longer poem about empathy and love:

“…All you can do is notice the bird

and feel for the bird       and write

to tell me how language feels

impossibly useless

but you are wrong

You are a bird-understander

better than I could ever be

who make so many noises

and call them song

These are your own words

your way of noticing

and saying plainly

of not turning away…”