While walking yesterday at Toolangi Forest Reserve, just north-east of
Melbourne, Australia, I was on the look-out for White-throated Needletails
because I do not see them often but have seen them there before.
I scoured the skies with the naked eye on occasions where the forest was
more open and saw none. However, when I looked through my 10 x 50
binoculars at a shape on the top of a high, dead tree, behind and very high
in the sky were hundreds of swifts, so high that I had great difficulty
discerning which of the two species they were. With a lot of imagination,
some of them seemed to have white under the rump and so they were probably
all Needletails.
I have two questions for the group:
1. How high were these swifts, and how many are sucked into the engines of
the jets on their long approach over Toolangi to Melbourne Aiport?
2. Are there swifts everywhere that we do not see until we look up with
binoculars?
Regards,
Gil Langfield
Melbourne, Australia
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