Rfalconcam Forum

Published: Saturday, December 19, 2009 at 6:01 a.m.
Last Modified: Saturday, December 19, 2009 at 1:18 a.m.

VACHERIE — The woman in the white SUV drove down River Road under a late afternoon sky and millions of tree swallows. She saw men and pickup trucks atop the levee, and stopped.

“What’s going on?” she yelled.

“Tree swallows,” a man yelled back. She drove off.

“See?” said Ken Prestenbach, 63, who has watched the birds’ fall roosting ritual the past few years from a second-floor window at the parish water plant.

“People pass every night. They don’t even look up.”

Prestenbach and some friends mount the levee near Oak Alley Plantation a few nights a week to watch “the most spectacular bird event in Louisiana.”

Tom Sylvest uses the phrase, then adds, “That’s not me. That’s Van Remsen at LSU who said that.”

Sylvest, retired from a chemical plant’s personnel department, writes the “Birds and Birding” column in the Lutcher News Examiner. Melvin Weber, 65, has spotted 300 species this year. Ronald Stein, 69, is cited in George H. Lowery Jr.’s “Louisiana Birds” as among “field ornithologists who are especially deserving of commendation”.

The flock is so big it sometimes shows up on weather radar.

Remsen, an LSU biology professor and curator of birds for the university’s Museum of Natural Science, said he was impressed.

“Millions,” Remsen said. “But no one has any good estimate. My best was 5 million, based on seeing five, 100-by-100-by-100 ‘cubes’ of birds in view at one time.”

An adult male tree swallow (Tachycineta bicolor) is smaller than a purple martin, also a swallow. Tree swallows eat flying insects and some fruit, which lets them winter along the Gulf Coast rather than in Central or South America, like birds that eat only bugs.

“Put that notebook up,” Sylvest said, “and look through these.”

Swallows had been strafing the little levee party for an hour. Binoculars revealed that a distant cloud of specks was made up of rivers of swallows feeding an aerial lake of birds that grew bigger and bigger and bigger.

“There they go,” Prestenbach breathed.

It was as if someone had pulled a drain on a sink filled with dark water. From a quarter-mile up, millions of swallows fed a funnel that elongated and touched the cane field across the road from the levee, touching down in waves of black on the dark green cane.

Most of the time, tree swallows live in old woodpecker holes and natural cavities.

What makes this a cane field to which they return night after night?

“No one knows and no way to know,” said Remsen. “Looks like any other cane field to me.”

The birds breed all over the U.S., Canada and Alaska, though North Louisiana is about as far south as they raise their chicks, Remsen said.

After they leave Vacherie, he said, the swallows probably go to coastal marshes. But no one knows. They likely come from all over eastern North America, Remsen said.

The cane fields may look like the reed beds that make a favored fall and winter roosting cover.

It’s hard to tell people where to go to see the swallows. Sylvest has driven a mile down a tractor road to find the roost in years past. This year is the first in anyone’s memory that the birds have roosted so conveniently close to a road with a levee for a reviewing stand.

Emotion creeps into the voices of Sylvest and Lawrence “Squint” Laiche when they talk about the swallows.

“I told Michael Seymour, he’s a biologist with Wildlife and Fisheries, that this is our passenger pigeon sighting,” said Laiche. “For someone who knows what he’s seeing, to see all these birds, it’s a gift from God.”

Passenger pigeons, now extinct, once darkened the sun with their numbers.

A couple of years ago, Laiche began calling Wildlife and Fisheries headquarters in Baton Rouge to ask that someone come down to document the roost.

“No one came,” said Laiche, a Shell Oil Norco supervisor. “Then, the phone rang one day, and it was young Michael Seymour. He said, ‘Are you the Mr. Laiche who knows about the tree swallow roost?’ ”

Two days later, Seymour was standing on the levee at dusk.

The farmer in whose fields the swallows roost told Sylvest he may wait until after Christmas to cut the cane.

After months of such presence the swallows will leave without warning, not to return until next October — the friends hope.

“You come one day,” Sylvest said, “and they’re not here. It gives you an empty feeling.”

That would be so cool to see. I wonder if my tree swallows are there?