Outdoors
| Aug 2010 The swifts were racing through the limestone gorge of Main Street, two feet above the ground, just missing the rush-hour traffic at 8 in the morning towards the end of June. Low enough for us to appreciate their size (6.5 inches long). Quite possibly breaking the speed limit - their maximum is about 65 m.p.h. Sheering sideways into the space beside Royal Cottage. Screaming on that note which seems the very nerve of speed and airflow and streamlined mastery. I began to wonder, yet again, why they scream. Can it be a form of sonar? Do the echoes bouncing back from walls and roofs help them to avoid all obstacles in that headlong career? One or two birds do that, in caves in the East Indies - in darkness, whereas swifts scream in full daylight. The experts give three reasons for it: when the birds want to frighten off marauders who come too near their nests; when they are fighting (sometimes to the point of bloodshed) with starlings and other swifts who have trespassed on their nesting areas; and because they are having ’social screaming parties’ which help the birds to bond as a group. I rather think they scream most when they are lowest down, nearest our streets and gardens, although of course we hear them best then. No other bird is both so close and so alien. We rarely see them at rest, close up. They whisk across our skies like spiders on speed, too fast to count reliably. Now we are shutting them out. The British swift population has dropped 41% since 1994. We block off the tops of our walls and any gaps in tiles or stonework so efficiently that the birds can’t get in to nest in the cramped dark spaces that they need. They almost never nest in houses built since 1960. I would be sad without them, if the sky from early May to mid August was empty of their scooting, scissoring black wing-shapes. On May 6 this year ’our’ swifts duly arrived on time, three of them. Since then I’ve never counted more than eight at any one time, compared with the twenty-plus in every year since 1977. The trio seem still to be together, in some relationship we don’t know about. Almost always, as I watch them from the garden towards sunset, they are in this grouping, a trio and a quartet. Maybe none of them are mature breeding birds as yet, in which case they will be flying 350,000 miles a year, ranging from Congo or South Africa to England and back again, never touching down. They sleep on the wing, they can even mate in mid-air, and I’ve heard their beaks click as they kiss a hundred feet above the ground. That morning down Main Street, they were repeatedly swooping up to the gutter at the ’Cottage’ end of the Royal and perching for a second. Were they practising the approach to future nesting sites? One bird even clung for some seconds to the face of a stone, looking like an Arabic letter, before dashing off northward. The late poet laureate, Ted Hughes, once said, ’As long as the swifts keep coming, we know things are all right.’ Just my feeling, as it is of the other people in the village who glory in this supreme immigrant to our country. |
