Swallows and Martins

These are birds that live in the air. They feed on the wing, drink on the wing, bathe by dipping into water without stopping, and come down only to nest, to roost and to collect mud. Everything about the way they are built — long pointed wings, tiny bill opening into a wide gape, feet good for gripping a ledge and almost nothing else — follows from that.

Which makes them one of the harder groups to photograph properly and one of the easiest to photograph badly. Tracking a hunting swallow is a genuine test: fast, low, and constantly changing direction, so most attempts produce a sharp background and a blurred bird. The alternative is to give up on flight and work the places they have to touch down — a wire, a bridge girder, a mud bank at the edge of a river. Those are brief visits, but they are predictable ones, and a bird collecting nest material will come back to the same patch of mud over and over.

Worth saying because it catches people out: swifts are not in this group and are not related to it. The resemblance is convergence, two families independently arriving at the same shape for the same reason. Swallows perch readily. Swifts effectively cannot.