Today while walking the dog I happened through a majestic three-way furball, a large wing of violet-green swallows and their allies the dragonflies against what must have been a considerable swarm of dastardly and delicious gnats.

I would guess there were thirty or so birds. The combatants were using rising air up from a large work pit bordering the gravel road I take to get to the dog’s accustomed playfield. The net effect was to place the zenith of the swallows’ upward trajectories just above my eye level about six feet out beyond the edge of the embankment I stood on, looking down into the action. It was as fantastic a session of aerobatics as one can ever hope to witness. Occasionally a patrol of two or three birds would wing out and around me until they saw my placid and uninterested large dog, where up they’d wheel back into the thick of it.

I did not notice any dropped frames. There was some sort of processor-intensive time-compression effect whereby the moment both lasted forever and was gone in an instant.