The day a Mungo swallow ‘slapped me in the face’

Roger Smith
Roger Smith

Zanci is a relic of a pastoral industry that farmed sheep in what is now protected as national park. The original house burnt down long ago, leaving only outhouses and a dugout cut into the ground as a coolroom for food and to provide protection against the furnace that is Mungo’s summer.

You used to be able to walk down the steep wooden slab steps into the darkness of the dugout, feeling the heat reduce as you descended underground into this pre-refrigerator space. But recently the NSW National Parks and Wildlife Service erected mesh over the doorway at the bottom of the steps to stop people entering the dugout.
Welcome swallows (Hirundo neoxena) have been building mud nests in the dugout for many years and would have been surprised by the obstruction but have got around it by flying straight through the 20cm openings in the mesh.
And that’s why one, on its way back to the nest, ended up in my face. Its angry squeak was saying “this gig is hard enough without you getting in the way”.
Another majestic aerial acrobat of Mungo is the white-backed swallow (Cheramoeca leucosterna), which lives and nests in an entirely different environment to its welcome cousins. My first encounter with them was high in Mungo’s eroded sand dunes, when one poked its head out of a hole I was inspecting at the side of a dune.
Once again I heard that angry squeak saying “get away from my nest”. I learnt that these little aerialists become terrestrial to dig their nesting burrows – each up to a metre long – into hard sand, to raise their chicks. How such tiny birds – adults grow to a length of about 15cm – manage this is beyond comprehension.



On most days at Mungo you’ll see these spectacular pied heroes hurtling over the ancient burial sites of the people, and the animals and plants, for which Mungo’s Walls of China are famous. These birds add an air of lightness to this enormously significant place, where the world’s oldest human burial was found.
Swallows are miraculous. Next time you see one, take time to watch it weaving through the sky hunting insects. To me, they’re the ultimate masters of the air; they revel in it, dancing about from dawn until sundown, landing only to preen before launching again into the ether to catch prey we can’t see.
But don’t get in their way, they’ll tell you off!
Read more from Roger’s Treading Lightly column.