The swifts are back!

The Swifts are back! The so-called ‘frog-gapers’ and ‘international mobsters’ described so perfectly by the late Ted Hughes in his children’s poem ‘Swifts’. It is the twenty-sixth of April, half a month earlier than the date which opens the poem but even this is a week or so behind when I would normally expect to first see them. In his opening verse Hughes describes how the swifts ‘materialise at the tip of a long scream…’ There is none of this youthful brashness for my first arrivals, two swifts silently marking their gentle arcs high above me in the sky. Are these the swifts that will breed in town or are they merely loitering to feed as they move slowly towards more northerly breeding sites? Over the coming days I expect to see them in greater numbers. Finally, their arrival confirmed, they will become a feature of my daily routine, catching my gaze in the evenings as they dash past my study window and into the nest site above.

The fact that the swifts return each summer never ceases to fill me with wonder, more so than when I hear my first willow warbler or cuckoo. There is something otherworldly about them, only landing to breed, they belong to the sky and not the ground. Their wheeling flights exhilarate because of the effortless ease with which they carve across great chunks of space. And yet they will be here for such a brief spell, just 16 weeks, before continuing their seemingly everlasting journey around the earth.

Distance seems to have little meaning to swifts. While breeding here, they may forage as far afield as Germany, tracking clockwise around low-pressure systems to seek those areas with the greatest abundance of their aerial prey. Immature birds (some immature swifts will not breed until their fourth year) undertake the same migrational journeys as the adults, arriving here to seek out vacant nest sites, planning for breeding seasons to come. During this period it is thought that young swifts remain entirely on the wing. This makes that first flight from the nest seem like a very big leap of faith.

The return of these denizens of the sky is reassuring and I do not know how I would feel if they failed to appear. Over the coming weeks I may become less aware of their presence, accepting them completely into the daily pattern of life as an ever-present backdrop to my day. But, come the end of the summer, I will notice that they have gone ­– the terrible feeling that something is missing. The process of loss and return is a balance of emotions, an affirmation that, as Hughes notes, ‘the globe’s still working’.