44 AMID THE HIGH HILLS 
Major C. R. E. RadclyfFe writes : 
" The point you raise re the relative speed of 
swifts and other birds is a difficult one to 
decide. 
" I have, however, a strong recollection of a 
brother falconer (I cannot remember who it was) 
telling me that his trained merlins could easily 
overhaul a swift, and he told me that once or 
twice they had killed them. But this was many 
years ago, and I am not able to remember all the 
facts. 
" I have often stood on the bridges here and 
watched swifts passing in hundreds close past me. 
They appear to be moving very fast when hawking 
after flies near the surface of a river. 
" There is a long stretch of broad water in the 
river in front of my house here, and often there 
are hundreds of swifts flying up and down it. 
They go about half a mile dead straight and then 
turn back over this stretch of the river. 
" I have flown fast carrier pigeons along this 
same bit of water, and they seem to do it in less 
time than the swifts. Only last summer, at my 
place in Scotland, I was sitting on the banks of 
the river watching some swifts, when a pair of 
blue rock pigeons came from their nest in the 
