Feather Bed

Once in a while, you get lucky. I did today when filming a pair of Tree Swallows that are incubating eggs in a nesting box in our yard.

Tree Swallows nest in cavities, including those provided by humans. They often line their grass-based nest with feathers.

Here are a series of photos of the pair of birds during a “routine” swap-of-duties, as I call it. There’s almost always one bird in the box. At regular intervals, they trade places. Today, when filming such an event, I captured one bird arriving with a feather in his beak, and a little aerial interaction over the prize, before the bird with the feather took it into the box.