Overview

Each May for fifteen consecutive years, Charles R. Brown has trekked to the Cedar Point Biological Station in western Nebraska to learn more about the behavior of colonial cliff swallows. He, his wife, and several student assistants spend the summers observing, catching, and banding swallows to determine life span, migration patterns, and nesting habits. Why study one species of swallow for fifteen years? With Swallow Summer Brown answers all the tourists, highway patrolmen, and local residents who have asked why he was leaning over bridges with nets, wading in mud up to his knees, or staring fixedly into culverts, where swallows often build their mud nests. He finds these birds fascinating. This book is about a passion for birds, but it is also about the personal challenges of scientific research. Brown provides a daily chronicle of field work at Cedar Point—including the joy of holding a swallow that has returned to the same site for eleven years and the inevitable frictions between researchers and local residents. Blending humorous anecdotes and insightful scientific observations, Brown writes an engaging tale. Moreover, he makes sophisticated biology accessible to anyone who cares about nature.

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9780803261457

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Reviews

Out there in the brute world, Brown (Biology/Univ. of Tulsa), a former curator of ornithology at Yale's Peabody Museum of Natural History, encounters rape and pillage, parasitism and unbridled egotism - just another day in the life of the cliff swallow. Yes, Petrochelidon pyrrhonota can be a mean and insecure little bird, but it's also gregarious, its flocks more like hordes, giving rise to cooperation and altruism. What makes swallows' enormous colonies tick, wondered Brown? Why all the rudeness amid the circumstantial advantage of their fellowship? ( The obvious conclusion is that these birds are little shits to each other. ) Then again, what's the story with those solitaires? Here Brown recounts a field season in his and his wife's study of the cliff swallow, an informal calendar of days that communicates the electricity in situ research can generate, as well as the down times, when weather brings a halt to the proceedings. There is a wealth of lightly imparted information in these pages: the role of ectoparasites in breeding success; the effects of predation by owls, kestrels, and grackles; the transfer of eggs from parent to surrogate. Then there are the mundane worries of having an observation site in a highway culvert and keeping assistants entertained when hurricane winds prevent them from recording bird captures. And always there are the doubts, such as the question of whether snapshot tallyings obscure wider patternings. The marvel here is that while sometimes the copious detailing can be overdone ( We load up our equipment . . . we unload . . . ), most of it conveys a real sense of fieldwork: discoveries, wasted efforts, frustrations, and the sublime moments of being at the fight place at the right time. If Brown teaches his university classes with the same relaxed aplomb with which he delivers this study, then he, unlike the swarming cliff swallow, is a rare bird. (Kirkus Reviews)

Author Information

Charles R. Brown is an associate professor of biology at the University of Tulsa and has served as a curator of ornithology at Yale’s Peabody Museum of Natural History. He co-authored with his wife, Mary, Coloniality in the Cliff Swallow: The Effect of Group Size on Social Behavior.

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