This is the seventh post in the NiCHE series Animal Encounters, edited by Heather Green and Caroline Abbott. You can read all posts in this series here.

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On a rainy afternoon one spring, I traveled with my family to the confluence of the Yangzi and the Han Rivers in Wuhan. When we arrived at the riverfront, it started to rain heavily, rendering the river scenery quite gloomy. Suddenly a bird flew passed me, quickly descending its black body into the waterscape. It was a swallow. Following it, I discovered a group of swallows hovering just above the surface of the waters. Seeing this, my father said, “the swallows have returned.” And, just like the swallows who had also returned from their wintering places, I had come back home. The swallow is me, and I am the swallow.

Swallows (in the family Hirundinidae) spread widely across the world, even as far as the Antarctic. The ones we usually call “swallows” are the fork-tailed species which I saw darted at water’s edge that day. I have fond memories about swallows—they built a nest just facing our door entrance and accompanied us through the years prior to my leaving home for study. Every time they flew around our balcony, my father would joke to me, “See, they are my pets!” Of course, they were not, but they always lived alongside us. Different from more common companion animals such as dogs and cats, swallows live alongside human households without being domesticated, distinct from the status of family pets. But that image of swallows living alongside with families has faded in recent years, especially in the urban areas. The declining population of swallows even prompted the bird-watching organization of Wuhan to call on urban households to participate in citizen science efforts surrounding swallows starting in 2017.¹

This estrangement of the human-swallow relationship cast a sharp contrast with the ubiquity of swallows that we find in historical records. The notion that the swallows are part of family life can be traced back to the early civilizations. Archeological and textual evidence reveals that the swallow was the cultural emblem of rites of passage in human lifecycle in various cultural contexts. For example, in ancient Egyptian mythology, the swallow was an important element in the Egyptian afterlife: The Book of the Dead had specific spells by which the deceased could transform into a swallow (Fig 3).² For early Chinese civilization, the swallow (usually called xuanniao in ancient texts, which literally means the black bird) was closely associated with the origin myth of the Shang dynasty (ca. 1600-1046 BCE) — a story which tells of a woman called Jiandi who ate a swallow’s egg and gave birth to Qi, the ancestor of the Shang. In the early writings, swallows were symbols of match-making and marriages, and thus, of family-making. In general, people considered the swallows an auspicious sign of the family fortune, and some species of swallows also gained the name of “family swallows” (Hirundo rustica, “jia yan” in Chinese).³

The swallow’s cultural relevance to Chinese history privileges it in archive. Though called the “family swallows,” they migrated and their migration behavior was well recorded in historical sources. As early as in the Warring States period (ca. 475 BCE- 221 BCE), people had noticed the seasonal migration of swallows, “Sudden and violent winds come… The swallows return [whence they came], and tribes of birds store up provisions.”⁴ In fact, based on my research in early 2017 for which I reviewed over two thousand local gazetteers at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science in Berlin, the swallow (yan), was the most recorded bird in Chinese local gazetteers.⁵ The initial objective of my research was to understand sustainability in late imperial China. While researching, I soon became interested in the question of how local literati recorded knowledge of local ecology, and especially about the birds, given their telling role in ecological changes. From this research, I amassed 2,228 data points on birds, including the origins of their names, physical features, and sometimes their habitats and role in agriculture. One result from an analysis of these data particularly struck me: it showed a high frequency of recording swallows in these sources.

A key reason for swallow’s ubiquitous present in the gazetteers might be due to swallows’ migration behavior, and so, their presence was often and repeatedly recorded as an indicator of seasonal changes (as often appeared in the Monthly Ordinances (yueling), an early form of Chinese phenological records).⁶ Indeed, the swallow’s connection to weather and seasonality had long been integrated into the traditional agricultural system, making other impacts on culture. For example, the ancestor of the Kingdom of Tan (collapsed ca. 414 BCE, present-day Shandong area) used the swallow to appoint officials — as in the case of Xuanniaoshi sikong, whose family observed the swallow for generations to determine the arrival of the Spring Equinox (Fig. 4).⁷ The significant role of the swallows in people’s lives renders it no surprise that Chinese literati tended to record them more.

In addition to local gazetteers, swallows are also prevalent in various Chinese art forms, ranging from poems to paintings, evidencing the role of swallows as vector for analogizing human emotions. For example, the Tang poet Liu Yuxi (772-842 CE), expressed his nostalgia and grief for the decline of prominent families through the dispersal of swallows into the families of lower classes or common people (旧时王谢堂前燕, 飞入寻常百姓家). In the image of “Dancing Beauty with a Swallow” (Fig. 5), the swallow and the woman seemed to synchronize their movements; their cheerful emotions are infectious. In more recent history, the swallow appears in the lyrics of one of the country’s most popular lullabies. Full of childish curiosity and innocence, this beloved song is passed down generations.⁸

The swallows’ rapidly-declining population indicates the changing dynamism of human-swallow interactions. Once so ubiquitous around human family dwellings, the swallows are hard to see around in the urban areas now. Urban residents are longing for their lost companion dwellers, as evidenced by the city-wide searches for swallows. When I visited my family in recent years, I could not see as many swallows nearby as before — that group of swallows I saw over the Yangzi and Han waters was a rare encounter. The swallows’ nest at the doorstep of my family is also gone; the silent, empty corner where the swallows’ nest used to be tells the story of an alienated kin in the urban living environments at the present day.

Notes:

[1] The trend of the swallow population is generally decreasing, though the degree of decreasing varies across geographical locations (44%-76%). See information on the general swallow population: BirdLife International (2024) Species factsheet: Barn Swallow Hirundo rustica. Downloaded from https://datazone.birdlife.org/species/factsheet/barn-swallow-hirundo-rustica on 08/11/2024. The barn swallow is listed as threatened in Canada under Schedule 1 of the Species at Risk Act (Government of Canada 2019), https://www.canada.ca/en/environment-climate-change/services/species-risk-public-registry/cosewic-assessments-status-reports/barn-swallow-2021.html.

[2] Abir Enany, “Towards Sunrise: Innovations in the Representations of the Swallow in the Funerary Papyri of the Twenty-First Dynasty,” Egypt Exploration Society, 108: 1-2 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1177/03075133221130370.

[3] “Xuan Niao,” in Shijing 诗经 (Book of Poetry); “Yin benji (Annals of Yin),”in Lü Shi Chun Qiu 吕氏春秋 (247 BCE-239 BCE); Dong Zhongshu, “Sandai gaizhi zhiwen,” in Chun Qiu Fan Lu 春秋繁露 (206 BCE-9 CE).

[4] “Yue Ling,” in Liji 礼记(The Classic of Rites) (475 BCE-221 BCE); “Shi Ze Xun,” in Huainanzi 淮南子 (206 BCE-9CE).

[5] This material is based upon research conducted while affiliated with the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science, and sources were made available during this affiliation via Staatbibliothek zu Berlin’s CrossAsia portal. The author used LoGaRT research tool to analyze local gazetteers. Chen, Shih-Pei, Calvin Yeh, Qun Che, and Sean Wang, LoGaRT: Local Gazetteers Research Tools (software) (Berlin: Max Planck Institute for the History of Science, 2017). https://www.mpiwg-berlin.mpg.de/research/projects/logart-local-gazetteers-researchtools.

[6] For a detailed discussion on Monthly Ordinances, See Zheng Xinxian, “Animals as Wonders: Writing Commentaries on Monthly Ordinances in Qing China.” in Dagmar Schäfer, Martina Siebert and Roel Sterckx, Animals through Chinese History: Earliest Times to 1911 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018). DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108551571.002.

[7] Zheng Zuoxin et al. (eds.), Zhongguo dongwu zhi(A Gazetteer of Animals in China), vol. 1(Beijing: Kexue chubanshe, 1997), p. 3. The official title “Xuanniaoshi sikong” is 玄鸟氏司空 in Chinese.

[8] The Song was first composed by Wang Lu in 1955. Later a Chinese musician Wang Junjie adapted the song for the film Hushi riji (The Diary of a Nurse), in which a famous Chinese actress Wang Danfeng sang the song.

Featured Image: Swallow on Flowering Peach Branch, China, Ming dynasty (1368-1644) or later, Cleveland Museum of Art (1941.287). Wikimedia.