The common swifts have left Basel, but there’s still another brilliant aerialist to observe

In the jet-lagged daze that I was (and actually still am) in after I returned to Switzerland last Wednesday, I did not think of looking into the sky to see if I could catch a last sighting of swifts before they head to Africa for the winter. Only on Saturday did they cross my mind, when they were almost certainly gone (at least the common swifts, as the Alpine swifts around the Basel Münster often leave later). But when I went on a walk this evening, I had several sightings of another magnificent aerialist: bats, whose insect-hunting flight through the same habitat as swifts has led them to evolve similar traits. (Andrew Shields, #111Words, 5 August 2024)