Swallow Summer

For many years, Brown, an associate professor of biology at the University of Tulsa, and his wife, Mary, have spent May through July lurking in culverts and under bridges of western Nebraska, getting personal with colonies of cliff swallows. This chronicle of their 15th such summer, in 1995, provides a revealing and often entertaining glimpse into the obsessive subculture of biological fieldwork, here centered around the Cedar Point field station near the Nebraska Sand Hills. The reader is given no more respite than are the Browns' three long-suffering assistants, subjected to a daily grind of netting, banding, and recording swallow tallies through frequently violent weather at dozens of breeding sites, which soon blur--except for the much-visited colony called Whitetail. And the author's paternalistic tone toward the young women who work with him--even cocking a disapproving eye at their bathroom and eating habits--gets old fast. But by midsummer a landscape and birdscape of surprising depth emerges. You come to know those Nebraska thunderheads, and you learn plenty to ponder about cliff swallow sex, language, predators, crimes from egg-dumping to juvenile kleptoparasitism and more. By migration time in late July, Brown has done a convincing, often moving, job of explaining why he and Mary devote so much of their life to ""the little butt-heads."" (Aug.)