On the Wing
My front yard is roughly an acre square and takes about an hour and a half to cut on the yard tractor. A few summers back I had the wonderful experience of watching some special birds while cutting the grass. They were not very big just gently gliding along about 6 feet off the ground and didn’t seem the least bit bothered by my presence.
Yesterday, that experience came back to me and I decided to Google, “Swift”. Can’t say for sure, but it seems pretty clear to me now that that’s what my visitors were on those warm summer afternoons. So, I spent a little time learning about these little guys.
We in America have our own variety of these birds called the, “Chimney Swift”. Like most all swift species, they are born in little nests that their mom and dad build with their own spit (saliva) stuck to the sides of, well in this case, chimneys mostly. (ever heard of “bird’s nest soup”?) Chimneys that aren’t in use during the warmer months.
When they are old enough to fly, they exit the nest and never touch the ground again until they are ready to build their own nest! That’s right, they LIVE totally in the air. They even fly while they are ASLEEP! How far do they fly before they ever land? Several hundred thousand miles lets say. Now that’s endurance! The only time they ever land is to raise their young each summer.
Think of all the time and ingenuity that goes into designing and building our most advanced aircraft and multiply that complexity and efficiency by a few orders of magnitude and you have this little bird that existed pretty much the same as we see it today as ancient fossils in stone. Sure tells me a lot about it’s Designer!
Wayne Hollyoak