A Blue-and-white Swallow with a view of Alajuela and the Santa Ana wind turbines

Nearly every day at Xandari you’re quite likely to spot some swallows zooming around anywhere between roughly ten and seventy feet above the ground, foraging for small insects on the wing. Chances are that these aerial insectivores are Blue-and-white Swallows (Pygochelidon cyanoleuca), although Northern Rough-winged Swallows have been seen here before too. The Blue-and-whites are typically in groups of five to twenty, but sometimes they’re solitary or in pairs, and you can also expect to see some swifts mixed in with the flock if there are lots of bugs in the air.

The footage above is from one afternoon last week when the swallows were enjoying a drink from our saline-treated swimming pool on the western end of Xandari property, known as the sunset pool for its great views of afternoon colors. I suspect that sometimes they’re also actually snatching small insects hovering over the surface of the water, but their primary purpose does seem to be hydration, although they might also benefit from the included salts.

The tough thing about swallow ID is that sometimes the Blue-and-whites don’t have too much blue iridescence on their backs in certain lighting, or if they’re juveniles; for this reason they can be confused for a Northern Rough-winged in tough conditions or to the untrained eye. The most useful distinction to look for is the white underside of the Blue-and-white, which abruptly ends toward the feet, where a black/blue starts and extends to the tail (and the tail itself is more forked in the Blue-and-white too apparently).