I remember being at the veterinarian and while waiting, I paged through one of the many animal books they had out (this one was lizards).
I laughed at one page (and took a picture), which showed an lizard with an inflatable pouch.
Underneath there was a picture of a Frigate with an inflated pouch, with the caption:
"FLASHY - The male Frigate bird attracts his mate in very much the same way the anole lizard does. He keeps his pouch inflated for several hours until she succumbs to his charms."
How on earth do you have an entire article about a specific type of bird without a single picture of one? They don't charge more for 4 color prints on the internet people...
i am often shocked at the lack of photos and diagrams, particularly in technical blog posts -- if you'll indulge me in a related tangent. the word-only approach likely points to the wide spectrum human cognition, and maybe some entrenchment around the arbitrary masculinization of backend vs "pretty frontend/design", and "technical" vs communication/marketing.
EDIT: I recognize this article is from NYTimes -- that need not be our gold standard for inspiring awesome communication!
I think part of it is "it works for me" thinking in conveying information. Someone who is good at pure reading and writing may not think to add any illustration to their work, in fiction and some non-fiction that works, but sometimes it really helps visual thinkers if you include some pictures or diagrams to show what the thing is.
I spent a long time trying to figure out math until I encountered college texts that represented things geometrically, it probably had not occurred to those people who wrote the 20 year old math books I encountered in high school to do such things, but since then someone somewhere figured out how to help people learn better by conveying the information in additional forms.
What a strange individual, picking up dead birds and wondering what to do with them, while admitting to polishing the skulls of other dead creatures in the past, then deciding: "yup, my freezer is a good place for this dead animal".
Later on (after the analogies to angels) she admits a past history of bullying and I couldn't help myself but say, "well duh".
That's factually incorrect. They nest and sometimes hibernate. They can and usually do spend the majority of their lives in the air, but they DO come down.
Maybe it's too stupid to even bring this up, but they could have added an 'almost never' into that title for the sake of scientific accuracy.
I assumed that they must come down to nest, of course, but this quote
> They mate on the wing. And while young martins and swallows return to their nests after their first flights, young swifts do not. As soon as they tip themselves free of the nest hole, they start flying, and they will not stop flying for two or three years, bathing in rain, feeding on airborne insects, winnowing fast and low to scoop fat mouthfuls of water from lakes and rivers.
really made it sound like they don't touch the ground at all for two or three years. I suppose this is possible if they only feed on insects, don't need to land to sleep, and can rest their bodies while flying.
EDIT: I found an article which supports the idea that they might stay aloft for months on end (https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cub.2016.09.014). They do land, just for very short periods of time and less than 1% of their time outside breeding season.
Hardly ever on the ground though. I'm assuming that's what she meant, since she mentions the nesting locations. A swift on the ground is probably a damaged bird. Which is why throwing it in the air (which is sometimes recommended) might not be a good idea.
We have a pair of swifts that return every year and nest under the roof tiles of our house deep in a forest. I can totally sympathize with this author's awe towards the tiny marvels. It feels like a privilege and a blessing to have them come visit, arriving from some southern African country every year.
Happy to have learned something new too: vesper flights.
This is about (common) swifts. I know some things about them.
Because a very long time ago I raised one, which was very difficult, but also enjoyable.
On the way home from last day of school before summer holidays I saw some bird chick on the ground, next to a closed wall of bricks, on the walkway, between one-way street with heavy traffic and a steep hill on the other side. I didn't know what to do, except not to blindly grab it and take it home, because sometimes the parents come and feed them. So I stood back about a dozen meters and waited for half an hour. No bird parents came, traffic on the street roared on and on. Couldn't make sense of where it would have fallen off, couldn't put it back where it came from beacause blank wall of bricks 4 to 5 meters high to some backyard was closed to the street. No doors/gates or something like that. Walked around the block to find entry, unsuccessfully. Walked back to where the chick still was, sitting miserably on the ground, almost no feathers, just some dark gray fluff, pink skin shining through.
Stood there and thought: Should I, shouldn't I?
What will Mommy say?
Knelt down to see if it had anything icky on it, which it hadn't and put it into the left cheat pocket of my shirt.
Didn't even struggle. Just looked around with its tiny dark eyes.
Some twenty minutes later, at home, unexpectedly no storm of rage because bringing back strange animals. Instead phoning around for some veterinary who does birds.
I somehow had the feeling that timing was essential here, so I grabbed my street bicycle without having lunch and speeded to the veterinarian. Again with the chick in my left shirt pocket, was afraid it would try to get out, but it seemed content to just look out from there.
The veterinarian examined it under a light and looking glass and found a hand full of tiny mites. Eeek! I haven't seen them! Strangely there were none in my shirt pocket.
Anyways, vet couldn't make out what it was exactly, because too young, settled for mostly some sort of swift and told me what to expect, and that it was a stupid thing to do, because if swift this would never be my bird, because they are wild things, almost always in the air, and nobody ever successfully raised one so far.
I answered that I know it's no Budgie or Canary, that I waited for the parents to show up, which they didn't, couldn't locate where it came from to put it back there, so certain death by car, cat, starvation was imminent.
So I got some tubes with different gels in it, which I had to give the chick with the food. Which was a mix of living mealworms to be obtained from fishing ponds where people use them as bait, deep frozen crickets from pet food stores, raw minced meat with egg white and yolk mixed in, and any living insects I managed to shoot down with the rubber rings from preserving jars :-)
Every two hours, at least! 24/7! For two months! Ugh!
Anyways, I did it, went to a museum of natural history to speak with an ornithologist there. Drove there by subway with it in my shirtpocket again :-)
Ornithologist confirmed bias of vet towards common swift, and lend me some books, plus a list of more titles from the library for learning the swarming patterns, to which I should release it when they appear in the sky.
So my summer holidays were effectively gone by having to care for it around the clock, without pauses longer than two hours. I didn't really mind, and chick neither. It grew into
something very streamlined, very dark brown and shiny feathers. It was primed to me and not afraid. I could put it onto my shoulder and it stayed there.
I worried a little about it being so lazy, so I trained it by putting it into my hands while standing, and then going down fast with my hands, to let its instincts kick in. Which they did, by spreading its wings.
Later, when it made strange rattling sounds by rhythmically spreading its wings to get the feathers out of their growing
sheets...
I must mirror what many other have said -- this is one of the more interesting and hopeful things I've read, not only on HN, but any place. Thank you for taking the time to share. And best wishes to you and your bird's offspring. You've done a good thing, worthy of celebration.
I believe OP was referencing the bird rescued when coming back home, which came back a few days later, not the one 30 years ago which OP never saw again.
I didn't mean to imply it was the same bird. That would be really unlikely, not only by the time, but also the different place i live in now. Just that it remembered at least my signal yellow wind jacket, and deemed it worthy to come down from the high up swarm alone and doing aerobatics for a few seconds while making untypical sounds in front of my face.
Why else should it do that(alone), apart from its swarm maybe 50 to 100meters up, not coming with it?
So what i meant to say was rather something like they(wild Birds in general) do remember you, even though not being grown up with/by humans.
I wish there was a better platform for sharing and saving stories like this. HN, Reddit, blogs, are all at the whims of companies and moderators, under the sword of Damocles.
Maybe something like Git repositories that readers could clone and archive on their local storage?
Hey, there is nothing to fix(apart from some typos which I can't edit anymore).
This is real and happened exactly as I wrote. At that point in time I've been that fast. I can be that fast today (the 40km/h I mean) even on a vintage bike with only 3 geared wheel hub, though it takes more effort, and not for more than a few minutes. On very good days I could hold 55 to 60km/h for maybe 30 minutes without headwind on flat grounds, and peaked 70+ for 1 to 2 minutes also.
There was a sports club called RSC(Radsport Club) Sturmvogel(stormbird) at the time, which trained in the forest where I rode too. I've always been faster than anyone of them, and generally one of the fastest of maybe a hand full of unidentified bicycling objects at the time there.
One tends to notice the faces, frames, routes and times when doing it as intensive as I did.
Let's just say I've been mostly unimpressed with Tour de France when it ran on the TV at the times?
Because I did it alone, without fanfare, much less expensive bicycles, no formal training, no car bringing a spare bike if mine had a problem, and...oh err yes....no doping at all!
K?
Regarding the bird on my shoulder, it was safe there as long as it could claw into my shirt. They (the swifts) don't like to stand on their thin legs, they prefer to hang from some wall more. So it either sat there, hanging back and down my back somewhat while I've been bend forward like you do on a racing bicycle, or in front of me somewhere around my neck, always looking around to all sides.
I don't know how to put this exactly, but when you spend so much time with them while they grow up you know them, not completely, but you can tell when they feel good.
And I'm telling you it had fun as in visibly enjoing it while I did that downhilling.
Really.
edit: OFC I had fun also, because speed is what I need!
When I was commuting to work before the pandemic, I would regularly keep up with city traffic at 40 km/h on a level road for up to a few minutes at a time. (Now that they'll be lowering the speed limit from 25 to 20 mph, I'll be able to break the speed limit if I wish.)
I've only once gotten up to 72 km/h on a downhill, keeping pace with traffic on a highway with a long downslope. I don't think I want to do it again, since the bike started to give a rather worrying 8 Hz shimmy, but I did it. I probably could have done 85 km/h if I'd kept it up continuously rather than sometimes coasting to keep my spacing.
Both of these require me to give it pretty much all my power in my highest gear, but this is on a hybrid commuter bike with a full pannier and an 85 kg rider.
I'm no star athlete. These speeds are well within normal bounds.
The shimmies! I've forgotten about them :-) Had them at 65. They were very unexpected when they happened the first time. And were gone at 67/68 again. I think they result from imbalances in the rims, due to the valves. And it varies with different frames-
It's actually part of how I know how fast I was going that one time. :-)
I was on a 45mph speed limit road and I was keeping up with the cars, but I wasn't sure if they were following the limit. But I was later able to tap at the same frequency while looking at a watch and discovered it was about 8 Hz, and then took the outer circumference of my tire and calculated that it was about 45 mph as well assuming that an imbalance in the wheel or tire was the source.
(My video camera had also caught some mile markers, but my speed varied in between, so those were only corroborative.)
Could the mites you mention be Louse Flies which are common Swifts? I used to live in apartment with many Swifts nesting under roof and a lot of these small unkillable critters (could survive being stepped on) crawled through cracks in the walls. They are not charming.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hippoboscidae
I can't tell exactly anymore? I just remember standing next to the vet, while she picked them off of it on a table with tweezers. Under bright lights and a looking/magnifying glass on a flexible arm. They've been maybe a millimeter long, at max. 2mm ? I could barely see them, if not for the bright lights and they being black brownish on a white sheet.
edit: This had to be the summer of 1981, 1982 or 1983, not later.
55 comments
[ 28.8 ms ] story [ 354 ms ] threadhttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frigatebird
Oh nice boobies!
I laughed at one page (and took a picture), which showed an lizard with an inflatable pouch.
Underneath there was a picture of a Frigate with an inflated pouch, with the caption:
"FLASHY - The male Frigate bird attracts his mate in very much the same way the anole lizard does. He keeps his pouch inflated for several hours until she succumbs to his charms."
:)
EDIT: I recognize this article is from NYTimes -- that need not be our gold standard for inspiring awesome communication!
I spent a long time trying to figure out math until I encountered college texts that represented things geometrically, it probably had not occurred to those people who wrote the 20 year old math books I encountered in high school to do such things, but since then someone somewhere figured out how to help people learn better by conveying the information in additional forms.
What a strange individual, picking up dead birds and wondering what to do with them, while admitting to polishing the skulls of other dead creatures in the past, then deciding: "yup, my freezer is a good place for this dead animal".
Later on (after the analogies to angels) she admits a past history of bullying and I couldn't help myself but say, "well duh".
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edible_bird%27s_nest
That's factually incorrect. They nest and sometimes hibernate. They can and usually do spend the majority of their lives in the air, but they DO come down.
Maybe it's too stupid to even bring this up, but they could have added an 'almost never' into that title for the sake of scientific accuracy.
Step 2: Back peddle in the article once you have what you wanted.
> They mate on the wing. And while young martins and swallows return to their nests after their first flights, young swifts do not. As soon as they tip themselves free of the nest hole, they start flying, and they will not stop flying for two or three years, bathing in rain, feeding on airborne insects, winnowing fast and low to scoop fat mouthfuls of water from lakes and rivers.
really made it sound like they don't touch the ground at all for two or three years. I suppose this is possible if they only feed on insects, don't need to land to sleep, and can rest their bodies while flying.
EDIT: I found an article which supports the idea that they might stay aloft for months on end (https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cub.2016.09.014). They do land, just for very short periods of time and less than 1% of their time outside breeding season.
https://www.birdspot.co.uk/bird-brain/is-it-true-swifts-cant...
Happy to have learned something new too: vesper flights.
Because a very long time ago I raised one, which was very difficult, but also enjoyable.
On the way home from last day of school before summer holidays I saw some bird chick on the ground, next to a closed wall of bricks, on the walkway, between one-way street with heavy traffic and a steep hill on the other side. I didn't know what to do, except not to blindly grab it and take it home, because sometimes the parents come and feed them. So I stood back about a dozen meters and waited for half an hour. No bird parents came, traffic on the street roared on and on. Couldn't make sense of where it would have fallen off, couldn't put it back where it came from beacause blank wall of bricks 4 to 5 meters high to some backyard was closed to the street. No doors/gates or something like that. Walked around the block to find entry, unsuccessfully. Walked back to where the chick still was, sitting miserably on the ground, almost no feathers, just some dark gray fluff, pink skin shining through.
Stood there and thought: Should I, shouldn't I? What will Mommy say?
Knelt down to see if it had anything icky on it, which it hadn't and put it into the left cheat pocket of my shirt. Didn't even struggle. Just looked around with its tiny dark eyes.
Some twenty minutes later, at home, unexpectedly no storm of rage because bringing back strange animals. Instead phoning around for some veterinary who does birds.
I somehow had the feeling that timing was essential here, so I grabbed my street bicycle without having lunch and speeded to the veterinarian. Again with the chick in my left shirt pocket, was afraid it would try to get out, but it seemed content to just look out from there.
The veterinarian examined it under a light and looking glass and found a hand full of tiny mites. Eeek! I haven't seen them! Strangely there were none in my shirt pocket.
Anyways, vet couldn't make out what it was exactly, because too young, settled for mostly some sort of swift and told me what to expect, and that it was a stupid thing to do, because if swift this would never be my bird, because they are wild things, almost always in the air, and nobody ever successfully raised one so far.
I answered that I know it's no Budgie or Canary, that I waited for the parents to show up, which they didn't, couldn't locate where it came from to put it back there, so certain death by car, cat, starvation was imminent.
So I got some tubes with different gels in it, which I had to give the chick with the food. Which was a mix of living mealworms to be obtained from fishing ponds where people use them as bait, deep frozen crickets from pet food stores, raw minced meat with egg white and yolk mixed in, and any living insects I managed to shoot down with the rubber rings from preserving jars :-)
Every two hours, at least! 24/7! For two months! Ugh!
Anyways, I did it, went to a museum of natural history to speak with an ornithologist there. Drove there by subway with it in my shirtpocket again :-)
Ornithologist confirmed bias of vet towards common swift, and lend me some books, plus a list of more titles from the library for learning the swarming patterns, to which I should release it when they appear in the sky.
So my summer holidays were effectively gone by having to care for it around the clock, without pauses longer than two hours. I didn't really mind, and chick neither. It grew into something very streamlined, very dark brown and shiny feathers. It was primed to me and not afraid. I could put it onto my shoulder and it stayed there.
I worried a little about it being so lazy, so I trained it by putting it into my hands while standing, and then going down fast with my hands, to let its instincts kick in. Which they did, by spreading its wings.
Later, when it made strange rattling sounds by rhythmically spreading its wings to get the feathers out of their growing sheets...
Thanks for sharing your story! Priceless.
Don't want to rob you from that emotion but Swifts can't live for 30 years.
Why else should it do that(alone), apart from its swarm maybe 50 to 100meters up, not coming with it?
So what i meant to say was rather something like they(wild Birds in general) do remember you, even though not being grown up with/by humans.
Awesome storytelling, thank you
Maybe something like Git repositories that readers could clone and archive on their local storage?
This is real and happened exactly as I wrote. At that point in time I've been that fast. I can be that fast today (the 40km/h I mean) even on a vintage bike with only 3 geared wheel hub, though it takes more effort, and not for more than a few minutes. On very good days I could hold 55 to 60km/h for maybe 30 minutes without headwind on flat grounds, and peaked 70+ for 1 to 2 minutes also.
There was a sports club called RSC(Radsport Club) Sturmvogel(stormbird) at the time, which trained in the forest where I rode too. I've always been faster than anyone of them, and generally one of the fastest of maybe a hand full of unidentified bicycling objects at the time there.
One tends to notice the faces, frames, routes and times when doing it as intensive as I did.
Let's just say I've been mostly unimpressed with Tour de France when it ran on the TV at the times?
Because I did it alone, without fanfare, much less expensive bicycles, no formal training, no car bringing a spare bike if mine had a problem, and...oh err yes....no doping at all!
K?
Regarding the bird on my shoulder, it was safe there as long as it could claw into my shirt. They (the swifts) don't like to stand on their thin legs, they prefer to hang from some wall more. So it either sat there, hanging back and down my back somewhat while I've been bend forward like you do on a racing bicycle, or in front of me somewhere around my neck, always looking around to all sides.
I don't know how to put this exactly, but when you spend so much time with them while they grow up you know them, not completely, but you can tell when they feel good.
And I'm telling you it had fun as in visibly enjoing it while I did that downhilling.
Really.
edit: OFC I had fun also, because speed is what I need!
When I was commuting to work before the pandemic, I would regularly keep up with city traffic at 40 km/h on a level road for up to a few minutes at a time. (Now that they'll be lowering the speed limit from 25 to 20 mph, I'll be able to break the speed limit if I wish.)
I've only once gotten up to 72 km/h on a downhill, keeping pace with traffic on a highway with a long downslope. I don't think I want to do it again, since the bike started to give a rather worrying 8 Hz shimmy, but I did it. I probably could have done 85 km/h if I'd kept it up continuously rather than sometimes coasting to keep my spacing.
Both of these require me to give it pretty much all my power in my highest gear, but this is on a hybrid commuter bike with a full pannier and an 85 kg rider.
I'm no star athlete. These speeds are well within normal bounds.
I was on a 45mph speed limit road and I was keeping up with the cars, but I wasn't sure if they were following the limit. But I was later able to tap at the same frequency while looking at a watch and discovered it was about 8 Hz, and then took the outer circumference of my tire and calculated that it was about 45 mph as well assuming that an imbalance in the wheel or tire was the source.
(My video camera had also caught some mile markers, but my speed varied in between, so those were only corroborative.)
edit: This had to be the summer of 1981, 1982 or 1983, not later.
Why don't we.