Dan's Feathursday Feature: Northern Rough-winged Swallow

Dan's Feathursday Feature is a regular contribution to the COS blog featuring the thoughts, insights, and photography of Chicago birder Dan Lory on birds of the Chicago region.

If D-76, stop bath, fixer, Dektol, enlarger, dodging card, and developing tray mean anything to you, you’ll appreciate my fascination with the Northern Rough-winged Swallow.

As the oldest child of three, I felt it my duty to please my father by showing interest in things I thought he thought I should like. Dad had a tiny darkroom in our basement, and when I was old enough to hold a developing tank, he was teaching me how to pop open a roll of black-and-white 35mm film and load it into a developing tank in the pitch dark. Once the film was developed and dry, we’d spend long hours under the dim red safe light turning negatives into positives—cropping, agonizing over exposure, watching the image magically appear on the photo paper, and hanging the wet prints up to dry.

Unencumbered by the self-imposed filial duties of the firstborn, my younger brother and sister wanted nothing to do with photography and the alchemist’s den known as the darkroom. Their loss. I was captivated by the whole photographic process—tweaking the camera settings with the help of a light meter to capture the image, developing the negative, and then enlarging and printing. From setting the aperture and shutter speed to hanging prints to dry, it was a slow, painstaking process. The “D” in front of SLR would usher in the instant gratification and almost infinite adjustability of modern DSLRs, but that was still decades away. A roll of 35mm film had only twenty-four or thirty-six exposures, with fixed film speed. If you wanted to switch from landscape photography to action shots, you either sacrificed the remaining film and inserted a roll with a higher ISO, or you carried a second camera. I couldn’t afford either, so I stuck to landscapes, occasionally thrilling to the discovery of a swooping swallow that I somehow captured in one of my shots. Actually, those photo-bombing birds might have been Chimney Swifts or Caspian Terns, for all I knew about birds at that time.

I never delved into color. I enjoyed the challenging simplicity of black-and-white.

My thoughts on b&w vs. color changed when I started birding. To photograph these beautiful creatures in monochrome seemed like viewing a Monet exhibit on a black-and-white television. Sure, I would manage to see and even feel the energy in each painting, but I would certainly miss the subtle interplay of colors and shades, the unexpected color contrasts and even the occasional intentional discord that can’t be captured in monochrome. Likewise with birds. There is beauty in the movement and the sound of birds, but their colors! They can take your breath away. A Ruby-throated Hummingbird supping at a trumpet vine. A Northern Shoveler winging low across a golden autumn sunset. An Eastern Bluebird perched in a blooming redbud in spring. I swoon just thinking of the beauty. Especially for a beginner birder, color is often the first thing we note about any bird we see, and the colors of a bird’s plumage play an important role in identifying it.

Digital photography dispensed with the long hours in the red glow of the darkroom safe light, only to replace it with countless hours in the soft glimmer of the computer screen. I no longer get my hands wet processing the shots, but reviewing hundreds of images after each outing, and then using software to crop, adjust the balance and saturation, and perform other fine-tuning is no less painstaking and no less time-consuming. Still, I enjoyed developing a whole new skill set, and I got pretty good at it.

And then I met the Northern Rough-winged Swallow. I became a big fan of this bird for several reasons. First, it was a good bird for practicing my burgeoning skills with the long, heavy telephoto lens. Even with the amazing autofocus and six-frames-per-second shutter of my first DSLR camera, just finding a swooping swallow in my viewfinder was challenge enough, let alone capturing a shot in focus and properly exposed. I coined the term vertiwhip to describe the dizzying whiplash induced by panning non-stop—left!/right!/down!/up!/left!/!up! After ten minutes of that torture, when I said “I’m sick of this!” I meant it literally. To avoid eating my breakfast in reverse I’d sometimes have to lie down on the grass for a while.

Which, by the way, is a nice position from which to view the swallows. Afraid to use camera or binoculars until the queasiness subsided, I’d just lie there watching the swallows and swifts flit about. They all had the same target and the same M.O., spastically chasing their insect dinner through an invisible maze of pathways, turning this way and that like winged bumper cars on steroids. Taking in the big picture like this, I found that I was able to begin to distinguish the various types of insect-chasing acrobats caroming above. The Chimney Swifts were easy, with their flying-cigar silhouette and stiff, rapid wingbeats. The orangish belly of the Barn Swallows sometimes stood out clearly, and if that was not enough, their forked tail clinched it. What made the Northern Rough-winged Swallows stand out was their chunkier shape, their broader wings, and their slower flight style. It’s all relative, of course; the Northern Rough-winged Swallows fly with more than enough gusto to induce vertiwhip when I try to photograph them, but their wing beats seem more deliberate than other swallows, and they often glide with wings spread for extended periods.

If you join me supine on the grass, another thing you will notice about the swallows and swifts flying overhead is that they could be as colorful as peacocks and you’d hardly be able to tell. They are often backlit and flying so fast that it can be very difficult to pick out plumage colors. To enjoy them, it’s best to learn how they fly and the shape of their wings.

In other words, the show is just as good in monochrome as it is in color. And the Northern Rough-winged Swallow carries this to the logical extreme. Its plumage is a minimalist palette of soft gray, gray-brown, and white, with no sharp contrasts. “Color, schmoler,” it seems to say. “Whatever I want to express can be done in monotone.” In fact, the Northern Rough-winged Swallow even sounds black-and-white. They call to each other with a toneless bzzzzt that mimics an electric bug-zapper.

The Northern Rough-winged Swallow prefers open areas near water, making it a perfect fit for my favorite lakeside grassland park. Often present there in large numbers, they have given me plenty of photo-ops. And the more I got to know them and study their photos, the more I came to feel that color was getting in the way of appreciating them fully. Whatever the background—deep blue sky, vibrant green leaves—it seemed the surrounding setting always stole the bird’s thunder.

So as I worked on my photos of the Northern Rough-winged Swallow, I decided to return to my black-and-white roots…and I loved what I found. It’s as if the bird was meant to be seen in monochrome. Turn that blue sky into crisp white-gray. Transform the steel-blue fence into Northern-Rough-winged-Swallow-taupe. Convert the moss-covered chunk of slag into a twenty-shades-of-gray Dolomite mountain-scape. Suppress the color clutter and the Northern Rough-winged Swallow comes alive in a fresh, simple way. That drab bird positively sparkles.

Of course, the Northern Rough-winged Swallow doesn’t need my help for it to shine. It’s I who needed help learning how to see it well. The minimalist swallow opened my eyes to how much I was being blinded by color. I find myself now seeking out the “dull” birds because of the elegance they project when seen in their stunning simplicity. Flycatchers, catbird, crow, kingbird, chickadee, female Indigo Buntings, cowbird, gulls. (Dare I go there…?) There is a surprising number of species whose plumage is fifty shades of gray.

I came to this realization only recently, and not in time to explore it further this year with the Northern Rough-winged Swallow. As if to taunt me, they seem to have vacated my favorite park, probably already on their way to their wintering grounds in Mexico and South America. That’s OK. There are plenty of other “dull” birds to keep me in practice until the swallows return in spring. And when they do return, there is something new I hope to capture on film. I learned that the Northern Rough-winged Swallow has an amazing way of drinking. It sips on the fly by skimming its wing in the water and then drinking the droplets from its wing.

Picture my dream photo. I am at water level when a lone Northern Rough-winged Swallow sweeps low over a placid Lake Michigan. Less than fifty feet away the bird dips its wing into the dark water, slicing the steel gray surface like a filet knife and raising a glistening spray a foot in the air. Before the shimmering plume cascades back into the lake, the swallow turns its head in my direction, the morning sun glinting in its flint-black eye, and drinks the white droplets that cling to its gray wing.

Wouldn’t that be thrilling? And if National Geographic should tell me they would like to run my photo, but I have to submit it in color, I’ll say (with a wink to the Northern Rough-winged Swallow), “Nah, I’m good.” There are times, I think, when it is best to set aside our multi-colored shades, strip things down, and see the world in black and white.