Return of the Swallows
It seems that in the 1600s, an English educator by the name of Charles Morton discovered that swallows were living on the moon. He, like everyone, noticed that the swallows were never around in the winter. He checked their nests, he checked the trees, he even checked the bottoms of ponds in a fruitless search for them. And after all, Francis Godwin had written The Man in the Moone (1638), in which a traveler to the moon met a "race" of birds living there. Morton went so far as to calculate the swallows' journey, stating that they flew at an average speed of 125 miles per hour during the two month long trip. There was no air resistance, and no gravity to burden their flight. Body fat, gained during the summer, sustained them, and they even slept most of the flight anyway. I wasn't expecting to see them Out There, but Tuesday evening there were great gobs of swallows. I say great gobs, but a group of swallows is more accurately known as a gulp, or a swoop. Apparently ...
