In the photo above, a barn swallow plucks from the surface of the water a tasty bug treat. Please click on the image and have a good look at it. (Use your back arrow to return to the post.) See the drag of the corner of the tail, for a couple of feet, as this bird dips its beak and skims the water’s surface as it flies at a ridiculously fast pace. The speed at which this bird constantly flies is hinted at in the image below.

This post is a mix of photos from the second week of June last year and yesterday.

I love when the bird’s reflection is caught on the water’s surface. I’m not conscious of this in real time as the bird’s flying too fast for me to process it. So, it’s something I can appreciate through the digital image when I’m back at my computer.

The photo below is of the water’s surface as I took yesterday’s pictures. It shows the banquet of bugs that I believe the swallow is dipping for at its leisure – hardly a difficult hunt.In a recent conversation with photographer Frank Winters, without using exact quotes he told me a bit about Henri Cartier-Bresson‘s thought that we get too hung up on perfect focus in photography. With that idea in mind, I share some photos here of the barn swallow that are a bit fuzzy around the edges! But I hope this gives you a sense of the speed of this bird.