I noticed a headline in the UK papers about the decline of the swift in England, something which doesn’t appear to be the case in Spain. This was just after I had been out only the balcony watching these beautiful birds do their regular ‘sweep’ of the street, gobbling up all those pesky flies.
As the birds swooped from one side of the street to the other, they came very close as usual. I thought one of them was going to clatter into the half-opened shutters. It didn’t, but it’s next move took me by surprise.
The bird suddenly shot up through a small gap between the shutter and the wall and disappeared. I waited for it to reappear, but it didn’t.
Popping into the room next door, I then heard the reason why it hadn’t come out again. It wasn’t stuck, it had built a nest in there! What’s more, you could hear the squeaky twittering of the swiftlets!
Deciding, then, to read the article about the swifts in the UK, I found out something (else) I didn’t know.
Swiftlets, as they seem to be called, are quite unique. When they leave the nest, they just sort of drop down and on the way, as they gain more and more speed, they open their wings and (hopefully) start to fly. FOR THE NEXT FOUR YEARS!
Apparently, their wings are too big and their little leggies are too short to enable them to take to the air again if they happen to get grounded. So they stay in the air until they are mature, which is about four years! They eat, drink and rest ‘on the wing’ the whole time. Amazing. You live and learn.