This Bird's Name Means Footless — and That Is Why People Hurt the Fallen Chicks

The common swift spends more than ninety-nine per cent of its ten non-breeding months airborne — some individuals literally never land. And its scientific name, Apus apus, means 'footless'. In this episode: why that word, an honest summary from people who only ever saw the bird in the sky, arrives four hundred years later as a wrong instruction in the hand of somebody who found a fallen chick; what was actually measured and what was merely assumed (in-flight sleep has NEVER been recorded in a swift — the only bird measured with electrodes is the frigatebird, and there it came to forty-two minutes a day against more than twelve hours on land); Emil Weitnauer, the Swiss village schoolteacher who chased the answer by balloon, by aeroplane and by radar and only entered a university at seventy-two; and the same word becoming a constellation, because bird of paradise skins reached Europe without legs in fifteen twenty-two. ⛔ Never throw a grounded bird into the air: hold it in cupped palms, raise your hands, and find a rehabilitator. 0:00 Abertura 0:19 Pick that bird up off the ground 0:52 Start with the part that is true, because the true 1:32 Now the name, which is where the story bends 2:11 And there is a number that gets in the way, because 2:47 And hold on to that gap between what was measured 3:00 The man who went after this first was not a 3:36 And his result is finer than the slogan that 4:10 And there is nobody stupid to blame in this story 4:53 The same mistake went up into the sky, under its 5:32 And the price of it is not in the past, it is now 6:10 And this is the point where the channel meets its 6:54 You stayed to the end, so write below the name of 7:20 Before you go, look at three places where a signal 7:43 And there is the sign that tripled the theft, from 8:09 And there is the computer that cannot draw lots 8:29 Notice that all three obey the same rule as this