Swift speeding

Caught at 1/5000 of a second, and still a bit soft.  I need to get into training if I'm going to get a sharper image :-)

It's such a pleasure, hearing the swifts screaming overhead - such a strong message about summer being on the way, about departures and returns.

I'm just finishing Helen's Macdonald's book 'Vesper Flights': a collection of her writing on various nature themes. It contains a particularly wonderful chapter about swifts - the one from which the book's title is taken, in fact.

In their 'vesper flights', at twilight and again just before dawn, swifts can go right up to 8000 feet. Flocks of swifts have shown up on radar, and been seen at great heights by aeroplane pilots. One suggestion, from various studies, is that they climb this high in order to sense complex weather changes, and also to orient themselves.

Macdonald concludes:
 "Swifts are my fable of community, teaching us about how to make right decisions in the face of oncoming bad weather, in the face of clouds that sit like dark rubble on our own horizon."