Swallow Koru, 28 x 28 inches
A koru is a Maori name for an unfurling, a sort of spiraling. For me, watching swallows chasing and catching bugs feels deliciously abundant, joyful, and kinesthetic. Life is born to move and dance. Like the delight of watching a fern’s spiraling unfurling.
These two swallows in the center of the feather tell a story about the abundance of insects they eat. They fly around to catch about this many or more bugs every hour.
The mechanics of flight of most insects is different from the mechanics of birds flight. I always imagined that because insects are so small, the air might feel like how moving through water feels to us. Then I can imagine that flight would be an easy thing: just move your arms or whatever you have and you will swim. However, insects employ a completely different kind of muscle movement than birds. The bugs flap their wings very fast and do not use the same aerodynamics that we associate with birds and airplanes.
For any of you science folks, I found this an interesting article about what we have learned so far about how insects fly. https://www.cell.com/current-biology/fulltext/S0960-9822(06)01420-5#relatedArticles. I guess part of the lesson in this article is that even though we think we are smart and know everything, we are just starting to to understand a part of what nature designed (insect flight) 350 million years ago.