Bank Swallow

About the Bank Swallow

The Bank Swallow is the smallest swallow in North America, a compact brown-and-white bundle of energy with a crisp dark breast band. It is a colonial nester, excavating burrows in vertical sand and dirt banks along rivers, sometimes hundreds of pairs to a single cutbank.

In Texas most Bank Swallows are passage migrants, swirling through in spring and again in late summer and fall, often mixed into big feeding flocks of other swallow species over ponds and treatment wetlands. Picking the small brown one with the neat chest band out of a cloud of swallows is a classic birding challenge.

This bird was photographed at Hornsby Bend in Austin, one of the best places in Central Texas to sort through migrating swallows.