Kelly At Large #133 The Swift Edition
A little ornithology in the glorious neighbourhood of Saint Blaise.
At first I thought they were bats, moving practically at the speed of light in the strange zigzag they have frantically searching for insects at dusk, except these things zipped by while we were eating lunch, and had boomerang-shaped wings.
For a minute, I wondered if they were swallows, which are pretty much the only fast-winged birds in my repertoire. But while Mr. Google said swallows are pretty fast, the birds I saw were almost terrifying speedsters—one zooming straight at our open window then pulling up at the last millisecond like one of those movies about arrogantly grinning fighter pilots—so that after a little more research I decided they were the aptly named swifts.
I got curious then, and found out that the speed of bats which zip around at 135 km/h was not far off from that of swifts which is regularly 115km/h and can hit 200km/h in a quick dive, while that of a swallow is a mere 60 km/h or so.
Neither swallow nor swift lingers too long in Paris, passing through for a few weeks or months on its trajectory between the British Isles and Africa south of the Sahara. If you see one hanging out on a phone line or rooftop it’s definitely a swallow. Swifts almost never alight, and can fly for several months at a time, getting their meals to-go from swarms of insects, having sex mid-air, and resting, folks speculate, by catching a rising current of air that pulls them along.
Scientists saying this behaviour might be explained by their unusually small legs which make it nearly impossible to take off again. There was some discussion in my household about whether or not this was a curse (that the bird could never rest), or a blessing (that the swift was more and more a creature of the air and resented every second they were trapped immobile away from the liberty of the sky). Maybe one day they’ll learn how to build their nests there, in the air itself, and their legs will shrink and disappear.
Since then I’ve been looking even closer at the birds that pass in the expanse between the row of seven story buildings I live in, and the even stubbier building in front sandwiched between two giant towers.
There are the pigeons that flap almost frantically but look pretty good once they hit a current of air. Crows are efficient fliers and gather two or three times a day in a murder which you could maybe call a conspiracy as well.
Yesterday, there was a seagull, and it must have felt so strong and stately as its wings beat the air that it couldn’t help but cry out in triumph as it moved from fifteen floors up to twenty. At thirty the whole neighbourhood must have heard it shriek.
I’m not just bored, I swear. I love looking out the windows at birds. My mother was always going on about the cardinals and bluejays. Once, when I lived in Brooklyn and heard seagulls crying for the sea I actually dreamed I was one, though in landlocked Kentucky, and swooped down and through a patch of snowy woods whose clean coldness I inhaled with every feathery breath.
I long to do that again. It beat those dreams when I can fly, but it’s really like swimming using the sculling stroke I learned the summer I begged to be part of a synchronised swimming team with my older sisters. And it was a miracle how you could lie flat in the water and just by moving your hands suspend yourself motionless on the surface of the water while you raised a leg or two, then sink like a sub, or flip yourself entirely upside down, just your legs scissoring in the air.
The stroke is just as useful in dreams, keeping you from falling to earth, but it falls short when it comes to agility and speed. And won’t help much at all if you find yourself being pursued by something operating in a different logic, for instance that of the earth while you’re pure water. In that case, and I speak from experience, the only thing to do is wake.
In Other News…
Even the attorney general, Bill Barr, who served George H. W. Bush before serving Donald Trump thinks Republican’s need to get a grip and accept that Trump is a loose canon, a liar and a menace to democracy.
Trump is a deeply flawed, incorrigible man who frequently brings calamity on himself and the country through his dishonesty and self-destructive recklessness. Even his supporters, who can’t help but acknowledge that he is own worst enemy, know it…
For the sake of the country, our party, and a basic respect for the truth, it is time that Republicans come to grips with the hard truths about President Trump’s conduct and its implications.
Here’s another important essay from Caroline Criado Perez, this time talking about how, even while workplace accidents seem to be going down, that’s mostly for men.
while overall workplaces are getting safer, they are getting more dangerous for women. And, according to this analysis, the major driver of this increase is violent attacks against women.
That’s it for this time.
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Disgruntedly yours,
xoxo K