Violet-green Swallow

Spring has sprung, and the Violet-greens are back in town! Every summer I look forward to the return of the swallows, and just yesterday we noticed that my mother’s “pet” Violet-greens were back in the neighbourhood. They spend the winter cozy and warm in Mexico, and return to the western States and Canada to breed each summer. They are similar in appearance to Tree Swallows, which have also made recent returns to Metro Vancouver.

Violet-greens, like all swallows, eat only flying insects. They zoom around like tiny fighter jets to catch insects in flight, chirping away the whole time. They’re cavity nesters, so they need hollow trees, bird boxes, or holes in the siding of your house to make their nests. The baby swallows learn to jump before they learn to fly, and last summer we had a fledgling Violet-green hiding in our backyard for two days and two nights before he learned to fly. (During that time, I received hourly updates by email about “Baby Bert,” and our dog’s backyard off-lease privileges were revoked. Bert finally learned to fly when a hummingbird came down and showed him how.)

I saw this pair of Violet-greens at Iona Beach in Richmond on April 1.