Swifts are probably the coolest birds in the world. I could go on for hours about them. Swifts eat, sleep, breed and feed on the wing. Once youngsters leave their nests they won't land again for two years. Their wings are so long that swifts flap helplessly, stranded like beached fish, should they land on the ground. Their tiny feet look like mouse paws. Their tiny beak hides a gape as huge and scary as a basking shark's, designed to scoop insect plankton from the air for hours and hours at a time. Did you know that young swifts can hibernate during periods of heavy rain? That swifts will fly a thousand miles to avoid a depression and then return when the rain has stopped? Oh, how unbelievably, bewilderingly weird they are.
Tuesday, May 02, 2006
Swifts.
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3 comments:
Do you think swifts are the birds Val describes in Tennessee Williams's Orpheus Descending (or the film The Fugitive Kind)? and that he just took poetic license in saying they only landed when they died?
Note how cleverly I am avoiding revealing that I have never read nor seen Orpheus Descending nor The Fugitive Kind.
you should see The Fugitive Kind--Anna Magnani and Marlon Brando at their best, and Joanne Woodward playing against type as a Southern rebel hussy. Good stuff!
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