(I was going to make the subject line "Hyattsville Swallows," but I didn't want
to give my town a bad reputation)

For the past few days I've had a very vocal Northern Rough-Winged Swallow on the
power line over my apartment parking lot in Hyattsville.  A few years ago I had
three of them on that wire for weeks, and once saw one of them carrying nesting
material, but I never found a nest, despite lots of cozy drainpipes in the stone
wall around the complex.  Never figured out why there were three of them,
either.

This morning, after seeing the one swallow in the parking lot, I was treated to
a group of 5 Rough-Wings swooping around near my bus stop a block away.  Then,
something very curious...  two swallows were sitting on a power line, minding
their own business, when a grackle flew by above the power line, and instead of
continuing in the same direction, the grackle did a 180 degree turn, dropped
altitude, and crossed the power line again below the swallows.  The grackle
landed on the ground nearby, then flew back in the direction it had originally
come from and repeated the whole sequence again! I was now convinced that the
grackle was deliberately trying to drive the swallows off the wire, and he
succeeded on his second attempt.  What puzzles me is why a big, bold grackle
would care about two tiny swallows on a wire.

Guess the swallows weren't too intimidated, though, because they returned to the
wires right across from the bus stop, one above and to the right of the other,
and groomed themselves in a slow, almost synchronized ballet.

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