The Barn Swallow (Hirundo rustica) is the farmyard's iconic aerial acrobat, 17–21 cm long including its tail streamers, with a wingspan of 32–35 cm and a weight of just 16–25 grams. It shows a glossy blue-black metallic upperside, a rust-red face, and an underside ranging from beige to orange-red depending on the individual, set off by extremely long, deeply forked outer tail feathers with white spots visible in flight. Females resemble males but have shorter streamers and paler underparts, while juveniles are browner above with shorter tails and a paler, orange-beige face lacking the adult's deep rust tone.
With 500,000–1,000,000 breeding pairs, the Barn Swallow remains common across Sweden up to southern and central Norrland, though numbers have declined since the 1980s as cattle-free farms replace traditional livestock holdings and flying insects grow scarcer. It nests almost exclusively indoors, in barns, stables and garages with cattle, building a half-open cup of saliva-bound mud pellets and grass lined with feathers, fixed to a beam or wall 1–5 metres up and reused and enlarged year after year; a female lays 4–5 eggs, incubated 14–16 days, and pairs raise two broods a season, sometimes three. The diet is almost entirely flying insects — flies, midges, beetles and wasps — taken in low hunting flight over fields and water. Its long, pattering song ends in a dry rattle, rendered "vit-vit-vit-vitrr...tvitvitvit," while the flight call is a simple "vit" or "tvitt" and a sharp "sjirrr" signals alarm. Birds arrive from wintering grounds in southern Africa in late April or May and depart again in August–September.
Read about this species in Swedish →