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Updated: June 24, 2025
The blackbirds were singing their loudest, the doves were cooing on the roof- ridge, the rooks in the high elm-trees beyond were garrulous among the young leaves, and the swifts wheeled whining about the gables. And the house itself was a fit guardian for all the beauty of this heart of summer.
Countless jackdaws and kestrels nestle in this cliff, as well as clouds of swifts, both Alpine and common. These swifts are the ornithological phenomenon of Rossano, and I think the citizens have cause to be thankful for their existence; to them I attribute the fact that there are so few flies, mosquitoes, and other aerial plagues here.
I would gladly have stayed longer on the heights, but it was pleasant also to be once more in the lowlands; to walk out after supper and look up instead of down, while the chimney swifts darted hither and thither with their merry, breathless cacklings. How welcome, too, were the hearty music of the robin and the carol of the grass finch!
The hedges, though low, are green, and bear the beautiful flowers of the wild convolvulus. Trees that were scarcely observed before, because bare of leaves, now appear, and crowds of birds, finches and sparrows, fly up from the corn. The black swifts wheel overhead, and the white-breasted swallows float in the azure.
"What are your plans for our search expedition, skipper?" Bud asked. Tom ran his fingers through his crew cut. "Let's see. We'd better take the Sky Queen, I think, and also " Tom broke off as the desk intercom buzzed. Miss Trent, the Swifts' secretary, was on the wire. "Your father's calling over the radio, Tom." "Swell!" Tom flicked a switch to cut in the signal of his private telephone.
Swift said, after hearing how the attacker had defied detection. "You'd better inform Admiral Walter. He had to fly back to Washington." "I'll call him right away," Tom promised. The admiral was equally disturbed when Tom succeeded in reaching him. "We must find that missile as soon as possible at any cost," he said. "Tom, you Swifts have had considerable experience in undersea dredging.
In pigeons alone there are carriers, pouters, tumblers, baldheads, beards, dragoons, barbs, jacobins, Antwerps, turbits, owls, orientals, damoscenes, capuchins, fantails, trumpeters, swifts, Lahores, Burmese, Scandaroons, magpies, nuns, Archangels, runts and so on.
Just so have the swifts left the hollow trees and taken to my chimney, the phoebe to my pigpen, the swallow to my barn loft, the vireo to my lilac bush, the screech owls to my apple trees, the red squirrel for its nest to my ice-house, and the flat-nosed adder to the sandy knoll by my beehives.
Looking upwards, you may see hundreds of them dancing in unalloyed delight, enjoying their brief existence in this beautiful world. Birds of many kinds, swallows and swifts, sparrows, fly-catchers, blackbirds, robins and wrens, all and sundry are busy chasing the poor green-drakes. As soon as the flies emerge from their husks and hover above the surface of the stream, many of them are snapped up.
Samples of the guano have been sent home, and have been analysed by Messrs. VOELCKER & CO. It is rich in ammonia and nitrogen and has been valued at £5 to £7 a ton in England. The bat-guano is said to be richer as a manure than that derived from the swifts.
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