WHITE-THROATED SWIFT 311 



one of the swiftest of them all. I am tempted to quote the following 

 appreciation from the writings of Dr. George M. Sutton (1935) : "The 

 Wliite-throated Swift belongs to the heavens, not to earth. Beautiful 

 as the creature is, when seen lying among the rocks where it has 

 fallen, or on your hand, it somehow is no longer a White-throated 

 Swift at all. Like a fish from the deep sea that has burst in shallow 

 water, it is only a mass of flesh already starting to decay — of feathers 

 that so recently had pushed aside the thin atmosphere of dizzy 

 heights; feathers that twanged and rustled as the bird shot forward 

 a hundred yards in a twinkling; feathers that knew nothing of the 

 shadows of forests, that knew only the shadows of clouds, the full 

 blaze of the sun, the coolness of clean unsealed pinnacles." 



Courtship. — Courtship seems to be performed largely, if not wholly, 

 on the wing. W. L. Dawson (1923) writes: "That most friendly 

 of encounters, the nuptial embrace, appears to take place, also, in 

 the air. In this the birds come together from opposite directions, 

 engage with the axes of their bodies held at a decided angle laterally, 

 and begin to tumble slowly downward, turning over and over the 

 while for several seconds, or until earth impends, whereupon they 

 separate without further ado." 



Enid Michael (1926) says: "White-throated Swifts we have seen 

 cling together and pin-wheel down through the air for a distance 

 of five hundred feet." 



Several others have noted a similar performance; and Frederick 

 C. Lincoln has twice collected, with a single shot, two birds in the 

 act, which in both cases proved to be a male and a female (Bradbury, 

 1918). 



But coition may take place in the nesting crevices also, for James 

 B. Dixon says in his notes: "The males are so amative that when 

 we would take the females out of the cracks they would pounce 

 onto them while in our hands ; and we actually caught a pair in this 

 way while hanging onto a ladder in front of the nest crack." 



Nesting. — The white-throated swift nests in cracks and crevices in 

 almost or quite inaccessible rocky cliffs on the sea coasts on rocky 

 islands oif the coast, and in the mountains up to elevations of 10,000 

 to 13,000 feet. Much has been written about the difficulties encoun- 

 tered in reaching the nests of these birds, for the nesting cliffs are 

 difficult, or impossible, to scale, and when the nesting crevice is 

 reached the nest is placed so far back in a narrow crack that it is 

 often beyond reach and sometimes even out of sight. Some few nests 

 have been found in niches at a comparatively low height in a cliff, 

 but usually a climb on a rope for 75 or 100 feet from the top or the 

 base of a cliff is necessary to reach the nests. This swift is evidently 

 one of the most successful of birds in placing its nest beyond the 



