Swifts of Cyprus
Every evening in late spring, as the light over Cyprus turns golden and the air begins to cool, the sky fills with a sound that stops you mid-step. A wild, piercing scream – not one bird, but ten, twenty, fifty – tearing between the church towers and old stone walls of village after village. If you've heard it, you'll never forget it. And if you look carefully, you may realise that not all these dark, boomerang-winged shapes above you are the same bird at all. Cyprus is home to four recorded species of swift. Together, they form a living mosaic in the island's skies – each one a different chapter of the same remarkable story. What Is a Swift? Swifts belong to the family Apodidae, within the order Apodiformes – a group whose nearest living relatives are not swallows, not martins, but hummingbirds. The family name, Apodidae, is derived from the Greek ἄπους (ápous), meaning "footless" – a reference to the small, weak legs of these most aerial of birds. The ancient Greeks genuinely believed the swift had no feet at all. They were not entirely wrong. Swifts have legs so reduced that they are almost invisible in flight, used only to cling to vertical surfaces. The tradition of depicting swifts without feet continued into the Middle Ages, as seen…
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