A Few of the Birds I Love

The Barn Swallow’s Flight Whenever you feel that there is no joy in the world, you must go to a place with swallows. Few things are more euphoric than a swallow in flight. The sun flashes on their iridescent backs. They swoop and dive and wheel around in reckless arcs. Up close they fly nearly too fast for your eyes to track. In a group their motion overwhelms your vision like a Fourth of July finale. Swallows catch insects from mid air with the acrobatics of a bat, but with much greater grace and speed. Their agility comes from the chef’s knife sharpness of their wings, the sleekness of their bodies, and from their forked tails that tilt and bank as a second pair of wings behind. Perhaps from swallow tails we can get some hint of how their four winged ancient cousins, the microraptors, would have flown. Picture the scene. You have a young child, three or four, a sunny field, and paper. The child asks you to make a paper airplane. Not satisfied with gliding, he wants one that does t ... Read full article.