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XXIX. 



THE DEPARTURE OF THE SWIFTS. 



THE earliest among all our summer migrants to leave us 

 for warmer autumn quarters are those large, dark, rapid 

 swallows, known best to country people as black martins 

 or jack-screamers, but to which ornithologists have given 

 the very appropriate name of swifts. They come in 

 spring a week or ten days later than their congeners 

 about the 2 5th of April in an average year and they 

 are all gone again by the first week in August, only a very 

 rare straggler being ever seen in England after the middle 

 of the month. Even in Southern Europe they do not 

 linger into September. No other bird except their 

 ally, the humming-bird is so ceaselessly active on its 

 wings as the swift. Popular science (or what once 

 passed for such) has told the same story about it as 

 about the bird of paradise : that it had no feet, and so 

 was compelled to keep for ever on the wing except 

 when in its nest ; and the fable has even been enshrined 

 by more rigid biologists in its systematic name of Cypselus 

 apus. On early summer evenings you may see the swifts 

 skimming the surface of still pools on their broad wings, 

 catching the May-flies and dragon-flies that hover above 

 the edge, and sometimes just dipping below the level in 



