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Warning!
MAY BE UNSUITABLE FOR IMPRESSIONABLE MINDS.
Well, there's nothing really unsuitable
for any audience here. This is a sequence of photos of White-throated
Swifts engaged in aerial copulation. They are well-known
for their mid-air mating. This is not necessarily an easy
activity to observe, but if you find an area where these
swifts congregate near a possible nesting area around mid-May,
you just might get to see this. They appear to tumble downward
while they are engaged as neither can flap enough or maintain
a proper airfoil to fly horizontally. In these shots, they
seem to be doing a perfect rendition of dual skydivers.
The taxonomic order that swifts occupy is
named Apodiformes, which translates into "without feet",
because their tiny feet were not often seen. It's interesting
to see that in the photos where the swifts are close to
each other, their feet are quite obvious.
These photos were captured with a lot of
luck, and flying swifts, at Pinnacles National Monument
on May 15, 2005. Their flights up the canyon along the trail
to the Bear Gulch Reservoir from the Visitor Center on the
east side were easy to observe as they were close to eye-level
and sometimes below the trail. I saw one swift carrying
nesting material into a fissure in a large spire near the
dam at the reservoir.
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