Vietnam or Thailand ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Updated: May 24, 2025
The young inventor nodded. "Yes, as soon as I've perfected all the gear I'll need which won't be long, I hope." Ames added, unhappily, that certain papers and news commentators had been making snide remarks about the Swifts' failure to match the Brungarians' submarine achievement. "I think Tom has that situation pretty well in hand," Mr. Swift remarked with a smile.
The entrance to most of the chickadee's nests is lateral, but I found one nest whose doorway was in the top of a fence post, so that the owners had to go down into it vertically. The hole was quite deep, and the birds would drop down into it as you have seen swifts dropping into a chimney, but whether they went down head first or tail first I could not learn, their movements were so quick.
Morning or evening, I would give something to witness so imposing a start. The recollection of this seaside gathering raises anew in my mind the question why, if swallows and swifts migrate exclusively in the daytime, we so rarely see anything of them on the passage.
Nevertheless, the migratory instinct is so powerful, that late in the autumn swallows, house-martins, and swifts frequently desert their tender young, leaving them to perish miserably in their nests. This fact, the Rev. Transact. 1824, and has since been confirmed by several observers, especially by Mr. Blackwall.
Swallows, martins, and swifts abounded; and as for insects, they were countless honey-bees, wild bees, humble-bees, varieties of wasps, butterflies an endless list. So common a plant as the arum did not seem to exist; on the other hand, ferns literally made up the hedges, growing in such quantities as to take the place of the grasses. There was, too, a great variety of moss and fungi.
"Those fellows, whoever they are, whether Montagne Lewis and his associates, or not, have bitten off several mouthfuls that they may be unable to chew. Anyhow, before they get through they may learn something about the Swifts that they never knew before." The Contract Signed
The flight of the hoopoe is undulating or jerky, like that of a butterfly. Young hoopoes are reared up in a hole in a building, or in a bank. The nest is incredibly malodoriferous. The flight and general appearance of the swifts have already been described.
It would be interesting to know how long our chimney swifts saw the open chimney-stacks of the early settlers beneath them before they abandoned the hollow trees in the woods and entered the chimneys for nesting and roosting purposes. Was the act an act of judgment, or simply an unreasoning impulse, like so much else in the lives of the wild creatures?
Numbers of caterpillars mounted the stalks of grass, and many dragonflies and butterflies appeared, though this was winter. The caprimulgus or goat-sucker, swifts, and different kinds of swallows, with a fiery-red bee-eater in flocks, showed that the lowest temperature here does not destroy the insects on which they feed.
He could see the plates riveted together, and then, as he noted the rounded, cylindrical shape, he knew that it was a submarine. It was the Wonder. She was close at hand and was creeping up on the Advance. But, what was more dangerous, she seemed to be slowly settling in the water. Another moment and her great screws might crash into the Conning tower of the Swifts' boat and shave it off.
Word Of The Day
Others Looking