Beyond Our Senses is a new nature documentary that gives audiences a bird’s-eye view of the world of Bank swallows.
The 30-minute film follows thousands of Bank swallows as they migrate from South America to Lake Michigan’s bluffs in the spring. It explores how the smallest swallow species in North America navigates the breeding season with its unique vision and flight abilities.
David Busse is a Milwaukee native and the director and producer behind the film. He says he hopes that seeing Bank swallows – how they carve colonies into the eroding cliffside, capture 7,000 insects a day to feed their chicks, and fend off predators – will inspire people to appreciate the world around them a little more.
“I never expected this population of birds so close to a major city, and I find it so wonderful that there are still forms of wildlife that can exist and seemingly thrive so close to us,” Busse says. “And I think there's a lot of that if you just take the time to notice it.”
To learn more about Bank swallows and the making of Beyond Our Senses, Lake Effect’s Xcaret Nuñez spoke with Busse for this month’s Chirp Chat.
You can find upcoming screenings of Beyond the Senses: Bank Swallows at the film’s website.
This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
Xcaret Nuñez: How did you get the idea to make this film?
David Busse: One day, I was at Sheridan Park, and I walked out to the edge of the bluff, and I saw thousands of birds swirling. I was not a bird guy before this, so I had no idea what they were — I was just fascinated by the fact that so many birds seemed to be thriving so close to the city of Milwaukee. After that day, it just stuck with me. I always had the idea to return and create a documentary about it, but it was a couple of years later that I eventually came back and started filming. And what I thought was just going to be a day or two of filming ended up turning into a summer, and then eventually a couple of summers of filming, editing, and eventually landing on a 30-minute documentary. When I started filming, I thought this was maybe going to be five minutes, but it just slowly evolved as I became more interested and fascinated with everything that I was seeing.
As someone who wasn't really a birder before making this film, how did you learn so much about Bank swallows and know what information to share with viewers?
That was a long journey. I captured what amounted to about 40 hours worth of footage, and as I was watching it, I still didn't really understand their behavior. So I got a lot of my information from the Cornell Lab of Ornithology. After that, though, there was still a gap [of knowledge] in their perceptions. So one of the most fascinating parts of their perceptions to me was something I found in a research paper: how all swallows have four distinct areas of focus in their vision. And when I found that research paper, I eventually reached out to one of the authors of the paper, Dr. Luke Tyrrell [of SUNY Plattsburgh]. I feel like I basically became a student and probably asked him what felt like 100 questions – he answered them all in detail. I was really deep in research for about two years in the free time I had.
Another big challenge for me was figuring out how to take this research-heavy topic and make it engaging. I got helpful feedback from a lot of different collaborators throughout Milwaukee, but I was still struggling with it. So I ended up reaching out to a writer with National Geographic and who has nature documentary experience – his name is Jack Chapman… and he helped me to take the script from something that felt kind of science-focused and dry to something that was really emotive and story-driven.
You note in the documentary that, globally, the conservation status of Bank swallows is of Least Concern. So what made you decide this was a bird worth talking about and raising awareness of?
[This film] really did just start by me being amazed at seeing them fly like fighter jets through the sky and living in these burrows that just all felt very alien to me. So it started as more of a curiosity than a mission-driven thing about conservation. But regarding conservation, it’s really interesting because, as much as they have this really strong colony, their numbers have dropped by about 90% in the last six decades or so. They're considered threatened species in Canada and also in California, but as you noted, they're still considered a species of least concern globally. So even though we've lost so much of their population, they still haven't crossed that threshold for how we measure species.
What are some of the threats that Banks Swallows face?
A lot of it really is the insect population. They’re considered an indicator species where, as the insect population has declined, so has the population of all aerial insectivores. So, Bank swallows, along with anything that hunts insects, their populations are declining. Another threat is that Bank swallows basically need erosion to live. They've done studies in California, where they did some bluff remediation along the coast, and the Bank swallow population wasn't doing too well. Then they removed the bluff remediation, allowing the bluff to erode more, and the Bank swallow populations rebounded. So it's this interesting tension where we generally see erosion as a bad thing, but Bank swallows need erosion for their habitat.
But as much as their population has been declining, their habitat generally seems to be okay because they live in these in-between places where humans can't really do much with it. So I think the biggest thing that we can do is try to help the insect population to rebound. So, anything you can do to use fewer pesticides in your lawn. Something else people can do to provide them with habitat is to build a nesting wall. It's basically a giant bird box, but instead of just one nest, you could have up to 40.
Chirp Chat’s Bird of the Month for June 2026
Belted Kingfisher
“The Kingfisher is maybe the unwanted neighbor of the Bank swallow,” Busse says. “They burrow with each other — if you were looking at a colony of Bank swallows, you might notice larger burrows somewhere. There's a good chance that that might be where a kingfisher lives. It's just so fascinating to watch because they always seem to be fighting with each other and they're very territorial… even as their neighbors and sharing the same habitat.”
