Of or Relating to Wings
Edmund Sandoval lives in Chicago, IL. His work has appeared in print and online in places like Hobart, American Literary Review, the minnesota review, and many others.
The Vaux’s swift is a small, flocking bird with a stout, lozenge-shaped body, reminiscent of a winged bottle cork. The shading of its feathers is the color of untreated railroad ties half an hour after a summer rain, fresh and dark; clusters of damp leaves in the heart of a coastal forest, and so fade easily into the daily early autumn dusk.
It hasn’t much beak or tail to speak of—perhaps this is because it takes its meals directly from the air, and need not peck the ground or a moldering branch in search of food. As for the tail, while there is some morbid appeal to imagining it being struck from its body by some spiteful creature of forgotten avian mythology, the reality is that it aids its migratory flights; aerial feats of endurance spanning thousands of miles, transcending borders, the concepts of.
They make their roosts within hollow trees or unused chimneys, compact and tidy among the many other swifts whose small bodies and breaths emanate warmth, like people in a packed bar in winter, keeping them snug through the night. The nests resemble tiny ceramic measuring cups, architectured from small twigs, and saliva. They jut from the surfaces to which they’re attached like primitive, rattan hammocks.
Before entering either tree or chimney to roost, they flood together in the sky and begin to rotate, a hurricane of hundreds of birds swirling funnel-like above their nesting place. It is an occurrence that is repeated by day. It has the hallmarks of ritual—communal, repetitive, sincere. And, like commuters the world over, they rise in the morning and return to the air.
Generally, the Vaux’s is a bird of the Northwest, claiming stakes throughout Washington, Idaho, Oregon, British Columbia, and Alberta. To the east of the Rockies is its mirror companion, the chimney swift. According to experts, the two are nearly indistinguishable, excepting when they sing. And, what, then, the difference between the two? And how do we differentiate between twins still in swaddling? On average, a mature Vaux’s weight is just over half an ounce, its small body delicate as a wad of gauze in hand. Upon emerging from the egg—ovoid, pale beige and cinder speckled—the hatchling, like all things newly born, is a melange of horror show and wonder, alien and pink and studded with pin feathers, splotches of down, a thin, brittle crust of dried albumen and vitellus.
In Breeding Biology of the Vaux Swift, Paul H. Baldwin and Nick K. Zaczkowsk wrote thus: “In 1962 we recorded new information on clutch size, the interval between laying of eggs, and parental attentiveness. The nest contained four eggs on June 17 at 1: 15 p.m.; no bird was in the chimney or vicinity at this time. At 6:45 p.m., a swift was in the flue clinging slightly above the nest, and that night two swifts perched together on the chimney wall, leaving the four eggs unattended.”
In a way, their flocking is like that of a peloton in orbit. From afar, it has a seamless appearance, an orchestrated ballet moving and reacting by sense, by memory, by the feel of a body displacing the air around it as it shifts and pumps. Yet, by squinting, by focusing the eyes, you can see there is constant, minute carnage, with birds knocking into each other as they circle the chimney’s crown, the horizontal tunnel of the flue, limbs pressing against limbs, little shoves, physics, the inertia gained by moving forward, always forward. Occasionally, one will peel off from the crowd like a race car driver, steering a wide arc to avoid a crash, and will right itself before reentering the scrum And it makes you wonder if birds, like planes, ever experience turbulence.
The Vaux’s is friendly; it is gregarious, it enjoys the company of others, in spite of its being labeled, perhaps unfairly, an unhandsome flyer. Its wing strokes have been described as choppy, and inelegant, while remaining metronomic in their constancy, as they must remain, for this particular variety of swift spends almost the entirety of its waking hours aloft, enrolled in an eternal forage for the sustenance needed to feed their bodies, their souls. Its counterpart, the aforementioned chimney swift, is thought to be the more courtly of the two when airborne, as it tends to glide through the firmament, rather than pawing at the air like the Vaux’s. With the difference in the proportions of their wings separated by less than a few millimeters, one must consider the environment the Vaux’s flies in, the speed of wind and breeze, the weight of weather, and if they are found the same, an examination of the motivations of the Vaux’s swift itself mustn’t be overlooked. Perhaps, they enjoy the impertinency of flight, the singular freedom of the sensation of weightlessness.
I mention its gregariousness because of its habits when it comes time for its migratory flight to Venezuela. When the time comes, thereabouts in the beginnings of September, the tail end of summer, the Vaux’s swift begins to gather, en masse, in a kind of alary hajj.
Its brain is smaller than its heart, around the size of a cultured pearl pried from a shell and harvested immaturely. It is a hardworking organ and shares its consistency with that of a hunk of Hubba Bubba pink bubble gum. It is as intricate as it is simple, and its diminutiveness is not relative to its feats of sheer physical endurance and mental fortitude. It is as steadfast as a pebble in a river.
The Vaux’s has a song similar to the chirrup of insects of the night. Cicadas, crickets, the whir of a mosquito drifting by your ear. This tune of stirring whirs and clicks makes its sonic appearance during their brief mating season, which occurs in the springtime, coinciding with the return of any number of insects and their own buzzing serenades. Thus, to hear the canticles of the Vaux’s requires an inspired and well-tuned collection of auditory apparatus. That and, of course, luck. A head cocked just so. The brief window of time when insects still slumber in the shade of a leaf, or a home’s easterly eave.