You know what’s fucked up as all hell?  Swifts and swallows are not closely related.  They look the same, they fly the same.  Swifts don’t have the iridescence.  That’s it.  They’re drab, but they’re winners.  Perversely, they are more closely related to hummingbirds than the iridescent and flashy swallows are.  I don’t know much about them, but I can paint one little scene for you…

Long before we were married, my husband and I were trying to live in Seattle, on the brink of getting bodily ejected by the cost of rent.  He was in the habit of taking the bus down to see his mother in Federal Way every weekend, and I began to go with him.  Most weekends were just a lil shopping, a visit to a park, eat at a restaurant one time, that kind of stuff.  Some weekends were family parties, crowded affairs where children were showered with gifts.  I appreciated it for food somebody else cooked, my husband felt some other type of way.  I remember the grass being dead yellow, tiny children being in the living room while a movie about lingerie women getting decapitated by a crude 3d sabertooth tiger played.

On one occasion, spring or summer, there were cool birds outside, nesting under the eave of the garage.  This was only about seven or eight feet off the ground, so real easy to see the babies yelling for food, and parents flapping in to give them a little.  They fly so fast, so fancy, it was a treat to watch them.  I’d seen them on the way in, and after the party had been running for a while, I stepped back outside to take another look.

As I was trying to watch the swifts fly above, I witnessed an insect doing a real similar type of predation.  I caught sight of a random gnat just in time to see a dragonfly buzz by and make it disappear.  If swifts or swallows are biting each other’s styles, both of them are biting dragonfly style.

There was some discussion of evicting the birds to do roofing, and I was like nay.  Intolerable!  I looked up the species, found out vaux’s swift fledges in a very short amount of time, and let them know.  As far as I know, they let the creatures live and did the work afterwards.  As far as I know.

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