Bill and others: I have found that bank swallows congregate each year about
now on the wires and roads along Wilderness Rd at the peat pits in Wayne
Co. Last week there were hundreds. Some times much more. Randy Rowe, Wooster

On Mon, Jul 18, 2016 at 5:33 PM, Bill Whan <[log in to unmask]> wrote:

> The account below I sent a couple years back below was not a fluke. Brad
> Sparks called me today and told me he and his family had passed along
> this same road with the same result recently, on or about 7/10, though
> he said the birds numbered about just a thousand. Maybe it was because
> the blacktop was not fresh this time, but it is a thrill to hear this
> same phenomenon is still going on. This spot is probably no longer
> active for the year, but you could run across something similar along a
> quiet tar road with utility lines near a place that harbors a lot of
> bank swallow nests right about now: an awesome spectacle!
> Bill Whan
>
> [7/20/2013:  I just talked with Brad Sparks, who within the past few
> days was driving from Columbus down to Chillicothe on Rte 23, and just
> for kicks took the side road next to 23 along the road past Charlie's
> Pond. This just happened to coincide with a similar date Laura and I
> went this way on 7/20/2011, and Tim and Laura Dornan happened to take a
> couple days earlier. All our experiences were similar: 10,000-plus bank
> swallows perched on wires, or sunning themselves along the pavement, in
> a one-mile stretch of this quiet roadway. A lot of the birds on the road
> itself were lying flat on the blacktop, and we all thought they were
> ridding themselves of parasites acquired during the nesting
> season--because of the road surface's heat and petrochemical
> exhalations--before migration.
>        It seems this is a yearly spectacle. Probably there are numerous
> quarries and aggregate industrial sites in the region along the Scioto
> River, where this species can establish nesting colonies, and their
> migratory flocks make use of this quiet area to assemble for their
> migrations to South America. Records from the past indicate that far
> larger numbers used to gather like this in northwest Ohio, but I haven't
> heard much about them recently. It's definitely a spectacle worth
> looking for in appropriate spots elsewhere in the state just now. BW""]
>
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