Swallow aerial

Starting right about now, most of my discoveries are going to involve either newly returned or, in the case of the Mourning Cloak butterfly I wrote about a couple of days ago, newly resurrected fauna and flora. This photo of a Tree Swallow falls in the former category: a migrant bird just up from winter quarters in Florida and Central America. Tree Swallows are among our earliest avian returnees, and they can get up north in advance of the competition because they have the almost magical ability to live on seeds and berries if their preferred food items, all manner of insects, are in short supply. This allows the aerialists, who always put on a fine flying show, to stake a claim to another resource in perennially short supply: the tree holes that the swallows use for nest sites. This bird, and maybe his nearby mate, had just attended an open house for one such bit of choice real estate. I don't know whether they put in a bid.