I found an amazing article from the New York Times and wanted to share it. It is a must-read!
The Mysterious Life of Birds Who Never Come Down
![](https://carolynbatesphoto.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/08/3108976d92da37f60ecff8a065bb9174.jpg)
Swifts spend all their time in the sky. What can their journeys tell us about the future?
July 29, 2020
New York Times
By Helen Macdonald
I found a dead common swift once, a husk of a bird under a bridge over the River Thames, where sunlight from the water cast bright scribbles on the arches above. I picked it up, held it in my palm, saw the dust in its feathers, its wings crossed like dull blades, its eyes tightly closed, and realized that I didn’t know what to do. This was a surprise. Encouraged by books, I’d always been the type of Gothic amateur naturalist who preserved interesting bits of the dead. I cleaned and polished fox skulls; disarticulated, dried and kept the wings of roadkill birds. But I knew, looking at the swift, that I could not do anything like that to it. The bird was suffused with a kind of seriousness very akin to holiness. I didn’t want to leave it there, so I took it home, swaddled it in a towel and tucked it in the freezer. It was in early May the next year, as soon as I saw the first returning swifts flowing down from the clouds, that I knew what I had to do. I went to the freezer, took out the swift and buried it in the garden one hand’s-width deep in earth newly warmed by the sun.