The Northern Black Swift 
but the Black Swift! For everybody knows by now that the Black 
Swift is a bird of the high mountains. This fellow in Santa Cruz has 
stumbled on some petrel’s egg, deposited, perhaps, in haste, on an exposed 
shelf instead of its habitual burrow. 
The Black Swift had for decades teased the oological imagination. 
The bird itself was none of the commonest; but when we did see it, 
we saw it in roving companies numbering scores or even hundreds. 
Every movement of these great, black, silent “sky-scrapers” bespoke 
mystery, no less than ease and power. A lucky day had found them 
gyrating about the solemn bastions of some basaltic range in eastern 
Oregon or Washington. Another had seen them madly crossing and 
recrossing the face of a giant bulwark of the high Sierras, or else hurtling 
like scimitars through the defiles of a frozen mountain pass. Again, 
it pleased their whim to descend upon the plains, a thousand strong, 
and there they hawked at insects, like swallows, albeit with a dash 
skill unknown to the swallows. At a time, again, they would deploy 
over the surface of one of the larger lakes, Chelan, Tahoe, or Washington; 
Taken in Santa Cruz Qounty Photo by the Author 
A BIT OF THE SANTA CRUZ COAST 
THE ONLY ESTABLISHED NESTING HAUNT OF THE BLACK SWIFT 
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