Tree Swallow

About the Tree Swallow

The Tree Swallow is steel and snow -- metallic blue-green above, immaculate white below, a two-tone bird that flashes like a thrown knife over Texas lakes in migration. Among our swallows it is the early bird and the late one, pushing north in February and lingering into winter, because it holds a card no other swallow has: when the insects give out, Tree Swallows switch to eating berries.

That trick lets them mass in numbers the others cannot sustain. Fall staging flocks over lakes and coastal marshes can run to the hundreds of thousands, funneling down at dusk like smoke into the roost -- one of North America's great underappreciated spectacles in miniature over any big Texas reservoir on the right September evening.

They are cavity nesters, the signature bluebird-box bird across the northern states, and migration is when Central Texas gets its share -- swirling over the water with the Barn and Cliff Swallows, instantly picked out by that clean white front.

These photos come from September 2024 over Lake Travis at Windy Point and an April 2025 spring bird. Swallow flight photography is a numbers game -- pick one bird, track it through the turn, and let the blue-green catch the sun.