Lovely Angele and Jonathan: every year they are plagued with people like me turning up with some poor bird or other in need of their life-saving knowledge. This is a swift I found in Carcassonne, huddled on a busy pavement. I put it someone's garden while I went to carry out the mission I was on, and returned wondering if would still be there. As I scrabbled around, reaching over the fence, the owner of the house came out and invited me to enter their garden and remove the bird. She then informed me that she hated such creatures and that they were dirty vermin . . . it's beyond me, how anyone could dislike these graceful masters of the air.
Someone gave me a shoe box and I took the bird back home. Our attempts to nourish it with cat food and flies seemed to be failing, so once again, down the road to see J and A. They already had two other swifts, eating and squeaking happily in their office. The new one joined them, poor scrawny thing. J didn't hold out much hope, but two weeks or so later the bird had put on weight and was ready to join it's bird-kind down at the coast as most of them had left Limoux.
Today I saw one or two swifts still riding the breezes — 'till next year.
No comments:
Post a Comment