Barn swallows

[Horse with no Name]

I have a tricky problem.
I have a nest of barn swallows that have made their home on the inside of my front porch on the light. They are beautiful birds and very busy!
It is a mud nest--and from what I understand, they are very difficult and time consuming to build.
It is full of babies and there are 2 adult birds.
The bird poop on my porch is horrendous.
I did some research on these birds and I truly do not have a better place to transplant their nest to and I hate to disrupt their home.
Does anyone have any workable ideas of how to keep the bird poop better contained or any ideas of what you have done--short of not using the porch?
Thanks.

[KarenS]

1. I think I'd leave it alone until the babies leave home,,,,,,

but after that, I'd take it down & watch it so they don't start another one (especially next season)

Can you put something down to cover the 'target area'?? I'm thinking a cheap tarp & duct tape,,,,, it would be easier to hose down for the short term, then tossed later.

Yikes!! Good Luck with this!!

[DemBones DemBones]

2. Take the nest down as soon as you're sure the babies are

on their own. Our barn swallows hatch two or three families every summer so you've got to evict them between families.

They are great birds to watch (aside from the poop.) I've learned from my own reading that they are altricial, meaning adult relatives other than parents sometimes help raise the young. Babies from early in the season will help with later litters, meaning as many as seven or eight swallows swooping around the nest. They also return to nest in the same spot year after year. At some point, when the parents die,
or retire to Florida, offspring reared in a particular location will nest in their site, often in the very same nest, just patching it up every year.

We've had barn swallows in the same corner of our carport since 1975. The old nest has been used almost exclusively, though a couple of times in recent years two new nests were built. Next month, we're enclosing the carport as a new room and I don't know where they will go but I hope we can shift them over to another location, like under the eaves -- preferably under the eaves of the toolshed where the poop problem won't be so bad! We do hate it when they poop on our cars, especially now that we have one that's navy blue and one that's black.

[Deja Q]

3. Flock mindset as they are a prey species.

To birds, it does take a village.

We're predators, apparently, so it's dog-eat-dog.

When we run out of dogs, I'm sure we'll end up starving. Bit of a pity, that...