The gathering

The walk home has a certain poignancy this evening. Above the riverside limes are swallows and house martins, a gathering of individuals feeding up before departing south. The chattering calls imply a sense of nervous anticipation and emphasise that these evenings will soon slip towards a silence that is broken only by the solitary robin, now delivering his winter song. Only a few brief weeks ago the evening skies rattled with the screech of swifts, their boisterous parties skimming the rooftops and delivering sweeping curves of noise. How quiet it will seem when the last of our summer migrants has gone.

While most migrant birds have to break their journey south to refuel at favoured stopover sites, the aerial-feeding swallows and martins have the option to feed on the wing as they go. In reality, however, even these birds must break their journeys, searching out sites and habitats rich in flying insects. The birds are feeding over the river this evening because there are good numbers of flies and other insects for them to pluck from the air. The same thing was happening the other night at a friend’s stable, the insects associated with the horses and muck providing rich pickings.

It is at this time of the year that we also see swallows and martins gathering on telegraph wires or fence lines. Others may be seen at favoured roost sites, typically situated over water and within a well-established reed bed. The numbers of birds using these sites often builds up over several nights, although the roost may suddenly break up in response to the unwelcome attentions of the local sparrowhawk or passing hobby, attracted to the roost by the pickings on offer. While the sparrowhawk will remain, the hobby may well follow the martins and swallows, harassing them at other roost sites on the long journey south.

I cast my eyes upward each evening as I wander along the river, seeking out these passing migrants. Just occasionally a late swift joins them, silently feeding alongside and also stocking up reserves for the journey ahead. Some of the swallows may winter as far south as South Africa, the swifts a little further north but where the martins go is a mystery still to be answered.

The swifts return

It takes a few moments for the soft, drawn out, screech to penetrate my memory but then, instinctively, I tilt my head back and scan the sky for the source of the sound. The screech comes again, this time overlapped by a second, and my eyes pick out the crescent-shaped forms of two swifts against the deep grey of the passing shower clouds. They are back, these sentinels of summer; these all too brief visitors from south of the Equator are here and I feel a surge of joy.

The return of the swifts draws out a stronger response from me than my first calling cuckoo, twittering swallow or scratching sedge warbler. Quite why this should be is impossible to explain. Being brought up in the countryside, I came to live alongside swifts rather later in life than I did these other returning summer visitors. Perhaps it is because I have spent the past decade living in an urban centre, where swift is virtually the only summering migrant, that this bird has come to signify summer so much more strongly than any other species.

Still watching the sky I pick out a third individual, the small party twisting and turning as they feed before sweeping across the sky in long and shallow arcs. The swifts continue this display for many minutes before drifting off behind the rooftops of a neighbouring street. Are these ‘my’ birds, the individuals that will breed in the roof-spaces of some of the houses along my street, or are they passing through, still on their journey north? Over the next few days I expect to see more individuals gathering in the sky above the garden and to hear that soft screech of summer.

For a swift the passing of a year is all about the journey; ever on the move, swifts spend such a small part of their year here in England that we can hardly claim ownership over them. This is, however, the one place where they come down to ‘touch’ the Earth, where they settle briefly to breed, so perhaps our connection with these wonderful birds holds greater significance than for those over whose lands they are merely passing while on their great annual journey.

Transition to evening

The swifts deliver stereo, a whole performance played out in the evening sky above me. Each scream, high-pitched with a rough and rasping edge, whizzes over and away at speed. The sound enters one ear, builds and then passes to the other like some carefully crafted accompaniment, best heard through headphones. Looking up from my book I see them, many more birds than the occasional drawn-out scream suggests; tiny, black bodies that scythe through the air on wings that beat rapidly and then solidify from blur to the solidity of a fixed-wing glide. Every now and then a group of these rapturous dogfighters wheels over in a low arc and I hear the rush of wind on their wings.

Five swifts blast onto my sky canvas from behind the towering of the next-door semi; a sudden jolt of noise that makes me jump in my seat, so sudden is the appearance. As they bank they flash from black to silver like shoaling fish in a vast ocean that stretches away to the deepest blue.

Even here, not far from the centre of town, there is a stillness that descends with evening and with it the sense that the transition from day to night is approaching. The air feels heavy and moist, the dry drones of daytime insects replaced by the flutter and whirr of the first of night’s moths nectaring on the flowers around me. Occasional noises from the back of the border suggest that larger creatures are also stirring, perhaps the wood mice that abuse my shed, raiding the bird feeders and amassing a winter store amid my carefully-arranged clutter.

A nearer movement gives the sense of being more lumbering than the skittish movements made by mice and I watch its progress as the moving vegetation points to a likely emergence at the border’s edge. Soon the source of the sound appears; a toad, replete and welcome. May he have a productive night feasting on the slugs that plague my tender flowers and vegetables.

By now my book lies face down on the table, the light faded to a point where reading is no longer possible. My ears pick up the sound of a feeding bat, the high-pitched echolocation calls still registering on my ageing ears. Every now and then I catch a glimpse of it as its silhouette flicks across the sky. It looks like one of the brown long-eared bats that catch yellow underwing moths and then carry them to the shelter of the passageway. There they will perch on the wall and remove the wings before munching noisily through the moths succulent body. It is time for me to head inside and tackle the final chores of the day.

A scream from above

I hear them from inside the house and feel a spark of excitement. In an instant I am out of the door and looking up at the dark, paynes grey-coloured sky. There they are, the curve of wings and the tiny streamlined bodies;­ the swifts are back. These are not the first swifts that I have seen this year but they are the ones that matter. These are the birds that will take up home in traditional sites along this urban street and these are the birds that will be ever present over the few short weeks that define our English summer. The swifts that I saw earlier in the year, hawking over flooded gravel pits on damp, overcast days, were transient pathfinder birds, passing through to breed somewhere else. It is ‘my’ swifts that matter and it is ‘my’ swifts that I await with such strong anticipation.

The hold that these summer visitors have over me is a relatively new thing; they are not a species with which I was closely associated in my rural childhood and it has only been since I moved into this small market town that they have come to mean so much. I think it is the coupling of their brief summer visitation with the knowledge that they have covered many thousands of miles, roaming over African landscapes, that creates a spell of great strength. They define my urban summer and when they leave and the sky falls silent, so I feel a sense of tremendous loss.

I know that I am not alone in the close connection that I feel with these birds. Phone calls and emails from worried friends, asking “where are the swifts; have they not arrived this year?”, tell me that others too wait anxiously for their arrival. The poet Ted Hughes captured this sense of nervous anticipation in one of his poems, delivering a great shout of relief once the birds appeared in the skies above his urban scene.

I like to imagine the journey that these tiny birds have made, to picture the different landscapes that they must have flown over, and the upward glances of those people who share ‘my’ swifts when they are elsewhere. The swifts spend so little time here that you might consider it wrong to think of them as ours, but they choose to make their homes here and to rear their chicks, so maybe it is a natural assertion to make.

Each morning, as I step out, I know I will glance up to the sky to check that the swifts are there, to take comfort in that knowledge and to hold it with me throughout the rest of the day. It feels good to have them home.

The grounded Swift

A phone call from home brought news of a grounded Swift. ‘Catch it and pop it in a bird bag somewhere cool and quiet’ I said, pondering that it was too early in the season for this to be a young bird that had left the nest prematurely. Sure enough, upon arrival home, an inspection of the bird revealed an adult, seemingly bright, alert and lacking any obvious injury. It could have collided with something, perhaps even another Swift (something which has been documented upon occasion) but a grounded adult would normally be able to take to the air. The notion that a grounded Swift cannot take to the air on its own comes from the fact that the majority of grounded Swifts are young birds, not sufficiently developed or too weak to fly.

I gave the bird the opportunity to fly, releasing it from an upstairs window but all it could do was glide down to the ground below in a soft arc, catching itself on a bush where it clung with its sharp claws to a leaf stalk. Further investigation revealed that the bird was significantly underweight and I wondered if it had got caught in a sudden downpour earlier in the week. If so, bedraggled it may have been grounded for sometime, becoming weaker to the extent that it was now unable to fly.

I do not make a habit of rehabilitating birds but this one seemed sufficiently bright enough to suggest that it might have a fighting chance. So now I find myself catching flies in the garden. Dutifully dispatched, the flies are fed to the Swift, which sits wrapped in cloth, and bill firmly shut. By gentle manipulation I can open the bill and present each fly to an eager palette. Each one is taken down with a visible gulp, the pale throat undulating and the eyes blinking, but the Swift seemingly otherwise nonplussed by my tender efforts. It is going to take a good number of flies, and many patient feeds if this bird is to recover to a point where it can take to the air again.

I suspect that this is a first year bird, the shape of the primary (main flight) feathers suggesting as much. This means that it is unlikely to be part of a breeding pair, since Swifts do not normally breed in their first year. This is something of a relief, since it will not have chicks dependent upon it for food. It’s too early to say how it will fare, even if I can get it back to a decent weight it might not be able to fly, but it is certainly worth a go.

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’.

A sense of anticipation

There is a sense of anticipation in our household at the moment, for any day now will see the return of our breeding swifts. This is the first house that I have shared with swifts and their presence during the early part of the summer is one of the perks of urban living. To sit in the back garden on a still summer’s evening and watch the parties of swifts screech past is magical. No wonder Ted Hughes felt driven to write a poem about them – these birds are the true masters of our skies.

The first swifts have been in the country for a couple of weeks now but the main arrival comes at the start of May, with birds returning to nest sites used the previous year. Their stay is a brief one, just sixteen weeks, making them one of the last migrants to arrive in spring and first to depart in late summer. The largest colonies within the county can be found in Norwich, where the birds nest in cavities under the eaves of older properties. Many of these nesting sites have been lost over the years as renovations restrict access to nesting chambers. New properties tend not to be swift-friendly, although some local authorities have taken the lead in adding swift boxes to their new developments, something that is not only an encouraging sign but also an indication of the strength of the relationship between ourselves and these enigmatic visitors. The name ‘swift’ comes from the Old English word ‘swifan’ which means ‘fast moving’, an apt name for this slender-bodied bird with its long, swept-back wings. Edward Thomas, in his poem ‘Haymaking’, described their form ‘as if the bow had flown off with the arrow’ and to me, this seems a most fitting description.

Swifts feed at higher altitudes than either swallows or house martins and undertake long flights in search of food. Depending upon the weather systems in place at the time, swifts breeding in Britain may forage as far afield as Germany, tracking clockwise around low-pressure systems to seek out areas with the greatest abundance of prey. If weather conditions are poor, then adult swifts may be unable to find sufficient food for their chicks and the chicks will enter a state of torpor. This behaviour enables them to go without food for up to 48 hours. Immatures may not breed until their fourth year and it is thought that during this period they remain entirely on the wing, again highlighting their mastery of the air. Given this behaviour, and the short duration of their stay in Britain, we cannot really call them ‘our’ swifts. They are brief visitors and we should enjoy them while we can.