"They're flying so fast," Tom said swiftly.

My dad gets a kick of of word games, plays on words, and birds of all sorts. The title of this blog is a nod to the first two (look up Tom Swifties if you don't know about them), and the subject is a nod to the third.

It's a bit out of order, a leftover from last weekend, but I thought it deserved to be posted. I took my dad to see the Chapman Swifts - not the rock group, the birds.

These west coast Vaux swifts gather and flock into a huge chimney at Chapman Elementary School every night in September. It's quite a sight to see and hear the thousands of birds gather and dive into the chimney.

Most of them fit with no trouble, but the last hundred or so would dive in, then sort of bubble out of the top of the chimney. They'd regroup and dive again.

The last bird to make it in got a loud cheer from the gathered crowd and the poor swift who became dinner for a peregrin falcon who swooped in for the kill got a sympathetic "Ahh!"