Barn Swallow and female White bellied Swallow Bank Swallow

Barn Swallow There are but few persons in the United States unacquainted with this gay, innocent, and active little bird. Indeed the whole tribe are so distinguished from the rest of small birds by their sweeping rapidity of flight, their peculiar aerial evolutions of wing over our fields and rivers, and through our very streets, from morning to night, that the light of heaven itself, the sky, the trees, or any other common objects of Nature, are not better known than the swallows. We welcome their first appearance with delight, as the faithful harbingers and companions of a flowery spring and ruddy summer; and when, after a long, frost-bound and boisterous winter, we hear it announced, that "the swallows are come," what a train of charming ideas are associated with the simple tidings! White-bellied Swallow This is the species hitherto supposed by the Europeans to be the same with their common martin, Hirundo urbica, a bird nowhere to be found within the United States....That ridiculous propensity in foreign writers to consider most of our birds as varieties of their own, has led them into many mistakes, which it hall be the business of the author of the present work to point out decisively, wherever he may meet with them. Bank Swallow, or Sand Martin This appears to be the most sociable with its king, and the least intimate with man, of all our swallows, living together in large communities of sometimes three or four hundred.