Swallow or house martin fallen from the nest: summer rescue guide

May to August is rescue season. Every year during this period, wildlife rescue centres receive hundreds of calls about swallows and house martins that have fallen from nests — or found on the pavement under a cornice. It's one of those situations where the instinct to help is right, but how you help makes all the difference.

First: let's learn to tell these birds apart, because the care they need is different.

Swallow, house martin and swift: the differences

They look similar in flight, but up close they're easy to tell apart.

Swallow (Hirundo rustica): metallic blue-black back, orange-red throat, creamy-white belly. The most visible feature is the deeply forked tail with two long outer streamers in adult males. Builds open cup nests with mud and grass inside barns, covered yards and porticos.

House martin (Delichon urbicum): more compact, cleaner colours — blue-black above, completely white below with a very visible white rump in flight. Tail is slightly forked but without the swallow's long streamers. Builds fully enclosed nests (with a single entry hole) using only mud, attached to the outside of buildings.

Common swift (Apus apus): uniformly dark, all brownish-black. Sickle-shaped wings, much longer and more rigid. Never perches on wires or branches — only in nest cavities. If you find one on the ground, follow the specific swift guide: the care required is completely different.

How to tell if it really needs help

Unlike the swift, swallows and house martins can perch normally on wires, branches and windowsills. A fully feathered juvenile that has landed on a pavement after a short flight, alert and lively, is probably learning to fly — and the parents are nearby watching.

It needs help if:

• It's on the ground with incomplete plumage (soft greyish-brown down, no developed flight feathers)
• It has visible injuries
• It's motionless and unresponsive
• The parents don't return after 1–2 hours of observation from a distance
• The nest is destroyed and can't be rebuilt

Before picking it up: move predators away (cats, dogs), keep your distance and watch for 1–2 hours. Count how often the parents return. If they come back regularly, don't intervene — you're watching the fledging process, not abandonment.

If the nest has fallen

This is the most favourable scenario. Swallow and house martin parents don't abandon chicks because they smell of humans — the myth that "the mother rejects them if she smells your scent" is completely false. Parents recognise their young by sound, not smell.

If the nest has fallen intact: reattach it in the same position with strong tape or screws. If it's damaged: build a substitute nest with a plastic or cardboard cup (small drainage holes in the bottom) lined with dry grass or straw, and hang it as close as possible to the original position.

Check that the parents return within an hour. If they don't, call the rescue centre.

How to keep it while waiting for the rescue centre

Cardboard box with ventilation holes. Line the bottom with a non-slip cloth — not smooth paper, not straw, not materials with loose threads (they wrap around the feet).

Don't put water bowls in: drowning risk for nestlings. You can put a few drops with a dropper on the edge of the beak, but only if it's alert and responsive.

The mistake that causes permanent damage

This is the most important point in the whole guide, so I'll say it clearly: never feed a swallow or house martin without explicit instructions from the rescue centre.

Swallows and house martins are obligate insectivores. Their nest diet consists of specific insects, in precise proportions, supplemented with vitamins and minerals that parents deliver naturally through partial digestion of food.

Feeding them with minced meat, wet bread, fishing worms, fruit or milk causes within 48–72 hours: calcium deficiency (spontaneous fractures), vitamin A deficit (blindness), muscle atrophy. A chick fed badly for a sustained period will never fly normally, even after apparent recovery.

Only wildlife rescue centres have the means to feed these birds properly — specific instars of house crickets, calibrated waxworm larvae, species-specific supplementation for each developmental stage.

Contact the rescue centre the same day

Don't wait until the next morning. A small chick cools down rapidly (it's warm-blooded but has very low body mass) and hypoglycaemia sets in within hours without feeding.

Something worth knowing

An adult swallow eats more than 500,000 insects in a single summer — mosquitoes, aphids, flies, agricultural pests. It travels up to 11,000 km on its migration to sub-Saharan Africa. And it returns every year to the same nest — studies have documented millimetre-accurate recognition of the same beam, the same corner, after a ten-thousand-kilometre journey.

The law on nests

It is illegal to remove, damage or destroy swallow and house martin nests during the breeding season (April–August), even on private buildings. Building renovation work affecting facades with active nests must be postponed to winter months or requires a special permit. Violation is a criminal offence under Law 157/1992 and the European Birds Directive.