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Observation details
An immense swarm of Barn Swallows intensified as dusk fell. Estimating numbers was really difficult of course, so here's how I came up with this number. I obtained a video of the flock from one spot at the northwest corner of the lake. Note that I made several minor misstatements in the video. First, the vegetation is not cattails but rather reeds or rushes of some type. Second, I stated one or two thousand birds were front of me, but upon reflection, that number is too low. There were at least 1,000 birds in the air but the reeds were already filled with at least three times that number. So I estimated four thousand birds in this one specific location where the video was taken. Birds kept flying into the reeds but it never looked like the number in the air lessened. If a grackle flew in and crashed landed in the reeds, you’d have 100+ Barn Swallows fly out of that tiny spot. Recognizing that I was witnessing an amazing concentration of Barn Swallows, I quickly drove along the west side of the lake. Much of the lake is lined with reeds and ALL of them had massive swarms of Barn Swallows as I drove along the west side. I have a little counting app that I wrote for iOS called Tally-ho. You tap the screen, it tallies numbers by adding a certain factor that you set. So you can count by 1s, 10s, 1000s, etc. So on my drive out, I just conservatively estimated how many Barn Swallows a given area of reeds would hold. I counted by 500 and tapped the phone based on the size (area) of vegetation. I ended up with 24,000 and just rounded up. (I was trying to count conservatively.) This does not account for the extensive area of reeds on the eastern and most of the southern sides of the lake. (I could see some of the southern shore, which was also teeming with Barn Swallows, and did include that in my estimate.) If one could count the entire lake, I would guess that there would easily have been 50,000 or maybe even 100,000 Barn Swallows.
Technical information
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- Original file size
- 30.48 MB