A defence of the common swift

These mornings, I’ve been hanging out on the balcony of an apartment on the top floor of a house built into the side of a hill. From here, I have a clear shot view of the houses built into the side of another hill, plus some higher mountains out back. Between this hillside and the other hillside is lush green valley.

The view is spectacular, but the real show is the performance of these manic pixie dream birds that dance around in the gap between over here and over there.

They’re too fast to capture with my camera, except as occasional flits through the landscape videos I capture on my phone. Some have white undersides, and their fast movement gives the effect of a flickering light as their bellies move in and out of my range of vision. And although they never seem to alight on anything, they swoop so close to my eave that I suspect there might be a nesting situation on the roof here.

I was assuming they were swallows, but this week I did a little bit of snooping online and determined they’re actually swifts.

Turns out, the swift barely ever stops flying. They can sleep, eat, and mate without ever touching down. Bird after my own heart, I suppose. Reminds me of that Judee Sill line that holds pride of place on a shelf in my brain: “I’m looking so hard for a place to land, that I almost forgot how to fly.”

It’s Easter, so I’ve resurrected (i.e., removed the paywall from) one of my archived posts. That means you can read it without a paid subscription.

Almost forgot how to fly