Martlet

Common card · No. 262998

A martlet in English heraldry is a mythical bird without feet that never roosts from the moment of its drop-birth until its death fall; martlets are proposed to be constantly on the wing. This condition is an allegory for continuous effort, expressed in heraldic charge depicting a stylised bird similar to a swift or a house martin, without feet. It should be distinguished from the merlette of French heraldry, which is a duck-like bird with a swan-neck and chopped-off beak and legs. The common swift rarely lands outside breeding season, and sleeps while airborne.

Read on Wikipedia · Image Lobsterthermidor (talk) 01:41, 25 November 2016 (UTC), CC BY-SA 3.0