A dispute over bird droppings has found its way onto the ballot in Rye. After a decision by the town’s Conservation Commission earlier this year to keep the windows of the town-owned Goss Farm barn closed during nesting season — effectively evicting a small colony of barn swallows that has summered inside the building for decades — supporters of the birds collected enough petition signatures to force a special town meeting and a vote on a “bird conservation ordinance” that would compel the town to protect migratory bird colonies on town property, as reported by NHPR. The episode is one of the more unusual chapters in the 403-year history of a town that has settled most of its land-use fights without involving birds at all.
Roughly a hundred Rye residents and outside supporters gathered at the barn over the past weekend to protest the closure, an unusually large turnout for a town-meeting-eve dispute in a community of roughly five thousand year-round residents. Whether the special meeting can be scheduled in time to affect the swallows’ 2026 nesting season is, at this point, an open question. The birds typically arrive from Central and South America in late April, which means the window for any meaningful protective action is already narrow.
A Barn With a History
The Goss Farm barn is not just any barn. It was owned by the Goss family for generations before being sold to the town in 2010, and the family’s connection to the building is still embedded in the public conversation around the dispute. Joe Goss, a member of the family that previously owned the property, has emerged as one of the public faces of the swallow advocates.
“There are alternatives but they don’t want to even think about them,” Goss told NHPR.
The dispute is, on its surface, about waste. Barn swallows are highly site-faithful — they return to the same nesting locations year after year, often to the same structure where they fledged — and a colony that has persisted at the Goss Farm barn for decades produces, over a single summer, a meaningful accumulation of droppings on the rafters, walls and floor. Volunteers had historically cleaned the barn at the end of the season, but Conservation Commission members have argued that the cumulative effect over years has rendered parts of the structure unsanitary, and that the commission’s plans for the building — including a community farmer’s market — are incompatible with active bird nesting.
In response, the commission erected what it has labeled “alternative structures” — bird houses near the barn intended to give the swallows somewhere else to nest. The trouble, as conservationists have pointed out, is that barn swallows are one of the bird species most dependent on man-made buildings for nesting, having essentially abandoned natural cliff and cave sites over the past several centuries in favor of human-built barns, sheds and porches. Whether the alternative structures will draw the colony is unknown. Birds, the saying goes, do not read signs.
What the Ordinance Would Do
The proposed bird conservation ordinance, drafted in language broad enough to apply beyond Goss Farm, would obligate the town to protect migratory bird colonies on town-owned property. In practice, supporters say, it would force the commission to reopen the barn windows and admit the few dozen returning swallows for the 2026 nesting season. Tom Sherman, a former state senator who lives up the street from the barn, has described that as the explicit goal: to “force the commission to open the barn this season.”
Critics of the ordinance — primarily Conservation Commission members — argue that the building belongs to the town, that the commission was elected to manage it, and that locking the structure into a single use determined by a population of birds undermines the flexibility that local government depends on. They have also pointed to the practical reality that, even with the windows open, accumulated droppings remain a real concern, and that a farmer’s market and a swallow colony cannot reasonably share the same airspace.
What’s Actually at Stake for the Swallows
Conservation experts who have weighed in on the dispute have made one point unambiguously clear: closing the barn this year is not a death sentence for the colony. It is, however, almost certainly a year of failed reproduction. Barn swallows do not nest where they cannot enter, and the species’ fidelity to known nesting sites means that some birds may try the alternative structures, some may relocate to another building in the area, and some may simply not breed in 2026.
For a species that has experienced documented population declines across its range over the past several decades — North American barn swallow populations have declined sharply since the 1970s, according to data from the U.S. Geological Survey’s Breeding Bird Survey and other long-running monitoring efforts — the loss of an established summer colony is not nothing. Each lost breeding year is a missing cohort of birds that would otherwise return to nest as adults two and three years later. Barn swallows are also one of the most studied songbird species in the world: their long migration, their tolerance of human structures and their open-rafter nesting make them an unusually accessible window into broader patterns of insectivorous bird population trends.
A Local Fight, A National Conversation
The Rye dispute lands in the middle of a broader conversation New Hampshire has been having about how to balance conservation against the economic and recreational uses of public property. The state has been weighing the neonicotinoid seed treatment study that pollinator advocates argued could quantify pesticide impact on insect populations the swallows depend on. Lawmakers and environmental groups have been pushing back against proposed federal rollbacks of the Roadless Rule on the White Mountain National Forest. And the state’s own turtle brigade has spent years building a volunteer infrastructure to help one of the state’s most charismatic reptiles get through nesting season alive.
In each case, the same underlying question recurs: when a wildlife population depends, in some material way, on a human-managed landscape, who owns the obligation to keep that population intact?
The Rye barn swallow ordinance, as written, would answer that question for one species and one building. Its symbolic reach, however, is broader. If a bird conservation ordinance can pass at a special town meeting in a 403-year-old Granite State town because residents felt that their conservation commission was making the wrong call, similar measures may begin to surface in other towns where conservation commissions and resident populations of returning migratory birds are at odds.
Town Meeting Timing
The article noting the petition’s success did not specify the date of the special meeting, and as of publication it had not been scheduled. Under New Hampshire town meeting law, a special meeting can be called outside the annual cycle when the petition signature threshold is met or when the selectboard determines a matter cannot wait for the next regular meeting. The practical question for Rye officials is whether a meeting can be held early enough in May or June to allow any pro-swallow vote to take effect before the colony either finds alternative quarters or, in some number of cases, fails to breed for the year.
Even residents who strongly oppose the ordinance have generally acknowledged the unusual nature of the moment. Town meeting in New Hampshire was designed for fights about roads, school budgets, zoning and the occasional dispute over the placement of a stop sign. A vote on whether to admit a colony of birds to a town-owned barn is not the kind of warrant article that comes around very often.
FAQ
For related coverage, see our reporting on Rye Defends Cutting 90 Beach Parking Spaces as Residents and Business Owners ….
