One of the most relaxing and fascinating activities of the season has to be just standing with your binoculars on your face and pass the time following the endless swinging movements of swallows and swifts. The moment you just lose one after nearly a minute of observation, you pick another one that happens to cross your field of view. I could be doing this for hours and hours with a smile on my face. Yesterday at dusk I was just doing this following a flock of common swallows, swifts and house martins, when a sand martin crossed my field of view. Oh, what a delight to follow it in flight, trying to remember, in pure awe, its name, since it's been a while since I saw the last one.
A little bird naming trivia:
In Spain we call the sand martin
avión zapador, which translates to something like digger or trencher. Martins get the common name
avión, which is the same word we use for airplane, but a term that goes back centuries to well before the French coined the name
avion in French, quite recently in historical terms. So, coincidentally, we use the same word for airplane and house martin:
avión, which puzzles many non-birders when they learn there is a little bird called
avión, airplane, and always ask how did we call the bird before the airplane was invented