Black swift is a heavenly ace, bearing warm weather on its wings

"Children of the air," "heavenly aces," "harbingers of the weather" - swifts have many different names. Black swift is a star of aerial acrobatics. It is very exciting to watch swifts when they gather in the hundreds in a huge flock and swirl across the sky with amazing agility. Theoretical calculations indicate that the swift flight is perfect.

Celestial aces, besides this, are unsurpassed architects. Nature has endowed these wonderful birds with unique salivary glands. The liquid that salivary glands secrete contains a lot of protein. In air, the protein turns into a concrete composition. Black swift is the habitual inhabitant of cities for us. He collects building material for the nest right on the fly, catches poplar fluff, paper scraps, another rubbish rising into the air, glues it all with his saliva and builds a cup-shaped dwelling somewhere under the cornice of the attic. Each such house is created creatively and according to the individual design of the feathered family.

The Bird of Swift very rarely descends to the earth's firmament, because its legs are short and not adapted even for sitting on twigs. Having risen to the ground, the swift is deprived of the opportunity to make sufficient sweeps of its wings to take off. But he can very easily catch his claws for the sheer rock or the stone wall of a tall house and curiously view the world from a height.

Why is a swift called a harbinger of the weather and how to feed swift at home? Swifts feed on "air plankton," that is, small insects and their larvae, which are lifted into the air by a warm and strong wind. The atmospheric streams heated up in the sun rises sharply upwards. Moss can not resist the force of the wind and fly through the air, forming plankton. This natural property is vital for swifts. Their life always depends on the weather and the strength of the wind. When there is no wind, the black swift is calm. As soon as the wind blew, carrying rain clouds, the birds begin to flutter and write out amazing pretzels in the air. Noticing this, people immediately realize that it's the swifts that rain forecrets them.

In cold weather Swifts never return from the southern countries. Depending on the weather, their flight sometimes lasts only eighteen days, and sometimes - all twenty-seven. But if the Swifts have arrived, then people are happy, because on their wings the warm and steady weather flies. And mysticism is not here. They just fly to the nest, adhering to the motion of the cyclone, because in the way they need food. Insects begin to multiply only in warm weather, so swifts choose the route of flight between heat and a counter strong wind.

Returning to the nesting site, the black swift rests from a difficult and long flight only one day and immediately begins to restore its nest or build a new one. The arrangement takes about a week. Eggs are immediately deposited in a new nest. Growing offspring, swifts will again begin to gather for the winter in distant Africa, crossing the equator, and the time of their departure will necessarily be associated with a change in weather conditions.