RSPB Spotlight: Swifts & Swallows

February 26, 2019 By John E. Riutta in Newly Noted Books Tags: aristotle, Bloomsbury, book, ecclesiastes, News, rspb, swallows, swifts, unwin

It was Aristotle, in the first book of his Nichomachean Ethics, who wrote, “For one swallow does not make a summer, nor does one day; and so too one day, or a short time, does not make a man blessed and happy” to conclude his point that the cultivation of virtue takes prolonged effort and a great amount of time.

So where am I going to go from this profound philosophical point to make a clever segue into Mike Unwin’s RSPB Spotlight: Swifts & Swallows? Not a clue – I just needed a familiar quote about either Swallows or Swifts, and I thought my other possible choice from the eleventh verse of the ninth chapter of Ecclesiastes “I returned, and saw under the sun, that the race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, neither yet bread to the wise, nor yet riches to men of understanding, nor yet favour to men of skill; but time and chance happeneth to them all” was a bit to forced.

“…to the ‘swift,'” get it?

Now do you see why I made the choice I did?

John E. Riutta

Founder and publisher of The Well-read Naturalist. Inveterate autodidact. Has repeatedly been found out standing in many fields. Plays well with otters.

→ John E. Riutta

Recent Reviews

The Marvelously Multifaceted Mr. Newton
January 22, 2023
Most of us likely first heard the name Isaac Newton when we were in primary school. For some, it may have been in a classroom; for others it may have been while viewing a television program – most likely a cartoon. However, in most all instances, I’d be willing to wager that the name was […]
Then There Were Dragons
November 20, 2022
The phrase “here there be dragons,” so famously seen on old maps indicating places where there were great and mysterious dangers to be found, was not so very long ago not simply a metaphor. In fact, no less an authority on natural philosophy (what would later become known as natural history) than Linnaeus himself included […]
Meeting Your Local Spiders
October 9, 2022
When it comes to lists of common phobias, arachnophobia – the fear of spiders – almost always makes the top ten, and more often than not, the top five. Some have even argued that the fear of spiders, like the fear of snakes, is an innate fear – people are simply born with it thanks […]