Hundreds of dead young tree swallows raise concerns in southeast N.B.

Ask Louis-Émile Cormier what he loves about tree swallows, and the tone of his voice immediately changes.

It's clear the retired arena worker is pretty fond of the aerial acrobats.

"Oh, they are so graceful when they do fly," he said in an interview from his Cocagne home.

"I have 35 [nesting] boxes down here at the [Cocagne] Marina, and I come almost every day with my coffee to watch them."

Cormier volunteers to tend to more than 250 nesting boxes in the area for the Pays de Cocagne Sustainable Development Group.

Unlike their cousin species of barn swallows and bank swallows, which are listed as endangered in this part of the country, tree swallow populations have been pretty healthy.

But this summer, Cormier got a bit of a shock.

He volunteered to help the group clean out some nesting boxes in the Dieppe/Shediac area after nesting season ended, and what they found wasn't good news.

While inland boxes near Dieppe showed lots of signs of successful nesting, a number of the boxes closer to the coast contained dead young birds.

Cormier's thoughts immediately turned to his own nesting boxes along the trails in and around the Cocagne River watershed.

He checked all 257 boxes, and found dead young birds in 67 of them.

"I've never seen this before," he said. "Really, it's just like losing a friend. Real sorrow."

Cormier said it looked like most of the birds were almost ready to begin flying at the time of their death.

"What's weird is last year, out of 250, I didn't have any dead young."