Cape Cod to Croatia and Back Again

If I haven’t blogged in a while, and I haven’t, it is because I was lucky enough to go with my husband to Germany. There we joined our daughter who is stationed there, for one last Gonser style, “drive till you drop” fling, before she would be deployed for a year. However, only half the days were “drive till you drop”, as in covering a lot of distance. The other half had potential to be “drive till you literally drop”, as in, off the edge of a cliff into the sea. My husband’s view is, why pay an exorbitant amount of Kuna’s (Croatian money) to take the straight-as-a die, get-you-there-alive, highway, when you can careen back and forth, along the entire coast on a sliver of road that hangs by a thread onto the mountain side. Of course, you would take the latter. Which admittedly provided us with THE most spectacular views. For that matter, I was often asking my daughter to take the picture because the ocean was, after all, right out the front window, not the side. Which was somewhat disconcerting. But we survived, and the views of the aquamarine Adriatic and the medieval cities of Rovinj and Dubrovnik, the many Roman ruins, and incredible waterfalls of Plitvice National Park will be ingrained on our retinas for some time to come. We are a family that does more “ingraining on retinas” rather than taking actual pictures, so you needn’t fear this becoming a 200-picture slide show retell of our trip.

As the focus here is generally on the natural, allow me to share just one of many of the natural highlights of the trip. Personally, I am not very good at keeping historical facts straight, or architectural styles correctly sorted by century, and sometimes, it is just easier in these wonderful cities, to just look up. It seems, no matter what European City you are in: Vienna, Budapest, Munich, Rome, or, in our case, all of Croatia, in the evening if you look up, you will see that the air above you is alive with the wild kamikaze flight pattern of European Swifts (Apus apus). They look rather like swallows, but they are in a separate family and their wings are shaped more like boomerangs. Here in the US we have Chimney Swifts that you might be familiar with.


You would look up too, just to see what was making such a racket up there, for they come swooping in, at these crazy high speeds and they seem to always be screeching. “Screaming” is actually the term bird books use for their vocalizations, and the females “scream” is supposedly higher pitched than the males. That provided hours of amusement for me, for as my husband and daughter decoded the cities fortified walls, I was seeing if I could pick out high screams from low screams. I don’t think I ever got it. The books say the birds indulge in “screaming parties” in the evening, which is definitely what we were witnessing. As the final matches of the World Cup were playing on Jumbo-trons in every city, there were plenty of “screaming parties” going on at our level too.


Its amazing how constant their activity was. The birds that is, they were often chasing each other, sometimes, swooping in clusters, sometimes fluttering near a window ledge to presumably feed the young swifts whose nests were hanging, under ledges and gutters all over the main squares. And their wild revved up flight is just the way they do business. They fly continually for they eat on the wing, catching bugs in their wide mouths (No wonder no DEET was necessary on this trip). They sleep on the wing, something no book every completely described satisfactorily. How do they keep from crashing into the omnipresent Roman ruins if they are asleep behind the proverbial wheel? I am going to guess that like many animals their sleep isn’t a deep one like ours. Some ducks shut down half their brain at a time, one eye open-one eye shut, half-awake, half-alert. Perhaps they do the same. They collect nesting material on the wing and sometimes-even mate on the wing. The young that were in their nests are likely not to touch down again for the next three years when they will be old enough to incubate eggs themselves. For that, they are willing to do sitting down.

As far as birds go, Swifts are fairly long lived, 9-10 years, and they always return to the same nesting spot, so you can imagine these Dubrovnik birds may have been coming here for the 1400 years that the walled city has been there. Speak about being true to your school! There is a nesting group in Oxford that has been continuously studied since 1948! The longest ongoing study of any bird anywhere, which is what happens if you hang out in major intellectual centers, you will be noticed, tagged and dutifully recorded.

Their scientific name (Apus apus) comes from the Greek meaning, “without feet” for with a life always in flight, feet seem a little superfluous. Theirs are short and stubby, which explains why they always looked like they were wildly scrabbling to hang on to the ledge as they fed the young. Probably much the same as our car looked as it scrabbled along the edges trying to hang onto the road.

One, I promised to keep the number to one of my natural history highlights of the trip and so I shall. Back to blogging about bogs in future days. Weeks have gone by, and much has changed in the dynamics around the bog. That is what we will return to another day. I do think though, that if Swifts should swoop into an evening view, I would be instantly transported to a warm night in an ancient walled city in Croatia, or almost anywhere else in Europe. And that is a lovely thought.