Barn swallow

While resting on the pier by the marina on the harborwalk at Port Washington, we watched the barn swallows perching on the wires. One of them seemed to have acquired a 2" fluffy gull feather behind its feet that it could not dislodge, despite about half an hour's effort.

The feather didn't seem to seriously impair flying.

A second barn swallow kept coming back to this one. At one point it looked like there was an attempt to mate, chased off by the first.

I wondered if the feather made the first bird look receptive. "Barn swallows prefer mates with long tail feathers. In general, it is the females that do the selecting in pairing and they prefer younger, more fertile males." So, unless that was two females, with the feather making the first bird look hyper-masculine, probably not.

But the second bird wasn't usually doing anything that might look agressive, so the feather wasn't making it look like a "chase it away" alien.

Has anybody seen this sort of thing before?