My father came back with a tasty mouthful in his beak. Like a moustache, the food hung out the left and right sides of his mouth. Right away, I opened my beak as wide as I could. But he was not interested in filling my mouth with food. Greedily I lunged over the edge of the exit hole to grab the rest of the food. He suddenly jumped back, and I fell out screaming. For a split second, I tried to grab him with my feet. I hurtled downwards, flapping my wings desperately. But just before the crash I expected, I noticed that I could fly! Reeling awkwardly, I followed my father to the closest tree. After I had rested for a while, I plucked up the courage to jump off on my own. I flew directly after my father, making all the curves and banks, zooms and dives, that he did. Later, I tried to get back into the nest. But it wasn’t easy. I managed when father helped me, and I crept back into the nest, which was stuck to the wall, quite exhausted.

My Name

I am a swallow, or more accurately known as “delichon urbica”. In contrast to the smoke swallow, my relative, my underside is as immaculate white. My tail also differs from hers. I think it’s much more beautiful, without those long, silly points, don’t you agree? I also think it makes more sense to fasten my nest on the outside of a building, instead of living with animals in a stall. My Latin name shows that scientists are only human, too. Actually, it comes from the Greek “he chelidon”, which simply means “the swallow”

Somebody mixed up the letters from “chelidon” and got “delichon”, which really doesn’t make any sense at. all. Since I live near humans, I was given the designation “urbica”, that is, belonging to a city.

My Flight Muscles

Do you have any idea why we birds are able to fly? It is not as easy as you might think. Our entire organism had to be specially designed for flight by our Creator. It’s not enough just to have feathers. We can move our wings up and down without effort. Most four-legged animals, on the contrary, move one foot forward, then another. You do the same thing with your arms, without thinking about it, when you walk. Of course, it’s a small thing. But without this instinctive moving of both sides at once, I couldn’t fly a single metre. Furthermore, we have to move our “fore-feet” (i.e. our wings) back and forth faster than any other animal. The record is held by our smallest colleague, the tiny, 3-centimetre tall hummingbird. He is able to flap his wings 80 times per second. If you had the same ratio of strength to weight that he has, you would be able to throw 56 sacks of cement higher than one metre into the air – every second. So you see, flying requires a lot of strength. That means our flight muscles – in relation to our body weight – are among the strongest muscles in the ani51 mal kingdom. They make up one-third of our body weight.

Scientists have discovered that an eagle produces a constant energy equivalent of one-tenth of a kilowatt. I admit that I can’t do that. But I am a lot smaller. Just think what the energy producing capacity of a human is. It’s no more than that of the average eagle. With such a pitiful energy capacity, you wouldn’t be able to handle even gliding for one minute, let alone any kind of powered flight.

My Feathers

You may find them quite ordinary, but look at your own skin with the few hairs on it. Look at the pelt of a guinea pig, the scales of a carp, or the cold skin of a frog – none of these outdo our feathers in terms of complexity, lightness, and beauty. You have undoubtedly heard of the theory which says that our feathers have developed from reptile scales. Well, I can’t believe such a thing. I believe what your own confession of faith says: “I believe that God created me, as well as all other creatures.” Just take one of our feathers in your hand, put it under a strong magnifying glass, or better yet, a microscope, and look at the structure. You will find an ingenious combination of strength, elasticity and lightness (“as light as a feather”) that simply can’t be imitated, even by your aeroplane designers

From each side of the quill in my feathers, several hundred parallel branches reach out. A crane’s feather has about 650 of these branches. You could see these with your naked eye, and even count them, if you had to. But from each of these 650 branches, another several hundred pairs of “rays” radiate out, both upward and downward. There are in total, more than one-and-a-half million of them

To keep the air from ineffectually streaming through these branches extending from each side of the quill, I need a special device to fasten the hundreds of feather branches together and yet keep them elastic. My Creator arranged this by giving me a special kind of zip. On the underside of each little branch piece, there are hundreds of rounded, and twisted loops. In the feather of a crane, there are 600 of these distal barbules

On exactly the opposite side of the next branch down, there are 600 little hooks, which fit into these loops exactly. The miracle of it all is that the hooks in the loops can slide back and forth, enabling the feather to broaden or to contract again. That’s important for me when it comes to soaring. And if this little zip device comes open, I can easily put it back together with my beak. Don’t I have a wonderful Creator!

My Wings

When air passes over an airfoil, forces arise which push it upwards. There’s a fairly complicated theory behind that, but I don’t want to bore you with it. The striking thing is that I can change the shape of my wing. I do it by erecting an extension of feathers on the front edge of my wing when I need to. This increases the lift. Naturally, this only happens when I am airborne. If the feathers were rigidly anchored to my wings, I could, of course, point them downward and thus obtain some lift. But then I’d nosedive because I would then have to lift my wing upwards, and this, in turn, would drive me downwards

My Creator took account of this and made sure that my feathers automatically twist somewhat whenever I lift my wings, so that they open like the slats of a Venetian blind, and the air can flow through. When I point my wings downwards, they close again, and I can soar high into the air. Since my wings also twist like an aeroplane propeller each time I beat them, they also propel me forwards

My Flying Expertise

You know that the Creator made us to be excellent fliers. Many ornithologists have even suggested that we spend the entire night in the air, since we don’t come back to our nests during the night. Actually, we do spend the largest part of our lives in the air

We zip from place to place like arrows. And if our lives are endangered, we fly upward so fast that even falcons are left behind. In order to be able to adjust our flight speed to different situations, we have been given the ability to enlarge or reduce the load-bearing surfaces of our wings

The Creator used a fabulous mechanism to further perfect the properties of our feathers. There are certain nerve paths in our skin near the roots of our feather quills. If the feathers are excessively loaded by the air stream, these nerves report the fact immediately to our brain. The brain, in turn, immediately gives orders for the individual position of the feathers to be altered. This all takes place in a fraction of a second. More than 1,200 tiny muscles are fastened to the roots of my feathers, to make the mechanism work. Can you still really believe that my feathers evolved from reptile scales?

My Lungs

If you ever climb the stairs of a church tower, you quickly get “out of breath.” You breathe much faster than normal. Of course, with us it’s a little different. At rest, I breathe something like 26 times a minute. While flying, it goes up to 490 ! You can well imagine that a normal lung system wouldn’t be able to handle the strain. So our Creator figured out something quite unusual for us.

When I fly, my lungs are supported by a whole row of bellows. These are air sacks of various sizes, that are not only connected to my lungs, but also to certain hollow areas in my bones. The constant contraction and relaxation of my flight muscles cause these air sacks to be compressed and expanded at the same rate. They are filled by air pressure coming from the slip stream as I fly. Through this special construction, my lungs are ventilated twice each time I breathe (by inhalation, and expansion of the air sacks). In addition, these air sacks serve as a cooling system for my highly stressed muscle system, and as padding for my inner organs. All of this is absolutely necessary, otherwise, our organs would be thrown to and fro by our constant acceleration and braking manoeuvres, and we would simply break apart.

My Nourishment

I find most of my nourishment in the air. When I’m providing food for my young, I spend at least 15 hours in the air every day. Since we have such slender pointed wings, we are extremely agile, and we can catch insects right in the air. We eat flies and mosquitoes, but also leaf lice and butterflies – whatever is available. While we are eating, we can open our beaks very wide. A few thousand of us in Hungary, were able to completely clear a corn field of black tree lice in a couple of days. But since you don’t have so many insects flying around in winter, we have to move to other locations in the south. We fly to the Near East or even deep into Africa. South of the Sahara, we find plenty of nourishment. In April or May, we gladly fly back to our old nest

My Trouble

While we’re away, sparrows often make themselves at home in our nests. Just imagine, if you came home from your holidays, and some stranger had taken over your home. You’d call the police immediately. But since we don’t have any police, we have to drive out the squatters ourselves. You can well imagine that it isn’t always particularly pleasant. Sometimes the fighting is so intense that the nest is actually destroyed. And one time – I admit, it wasn’t a very nice thing to do – we just went ahead and walled the sparrows in and let them starve.

My Home

I’m sure you have seen my house before. Actually, it is something of a built-on extension to your own houses. I only live there for a couple of months. It’s built of a thin mud paste, and is fastened high under the eaves so it’s protected from the rain. Usually, another pair of swallows helps us with the building programme, so we’re able to complete the nest in 10 to 14 days. Then we help them.

I won’t deny that we’re very “human” about the whole thing. If our neighbours don’t watch out, we steal some of their nesting material, which they have just built into their own nest. That way we save ourselves a lot of flying, but we often pay for it in terms of aggravation. Naturally, our neighbours do the same thing to us.

We build our nest so that it is almost completely closed. Only a small hole remains open at the top. Inside, we carefully upholster with moss, blades of grass, small feathers and fluff. You can be assured, we always keep the place clean and neat. If it ever looks untidy, you can account it down to the sparrows who have trespassed and made it their own nest.

By the way, do you know that we too appear in the Bible? In Psalm 84, verses 3 and 4, it says:

“Even the sparrow has found a home, and the swallow has a nest for herself, where she may have her young - A place near your altar, O Lord of Hosts, My King and My God. Blessed are those who live in your house, And who are ever praising you.”

Actually, our ancestors even fastened their nests on the buildings of the temple in Jerusalem. There, close to God, they felt right at home. I know that God is everywhere. That means He is near you, too. I am so happy to have such a wonderful Creator! From my whole heart, I want to praise Him, just as it says in Psalm 84:2: “My heart and my flesh cry out to the Living God.”

Do you feel at home with God, too?