It is a glorious end to a glorious summer’s day; the air is soft-pawed and warm, and everything is bathed in saffron-coloured sunset light. I turn my eyes to the skies.
I used to live on this street, and last year I was often mesmerised by the frenzied evening rituals of the local swifts. I have returned to help a local voluntary project, Otley Swift Watch, construct a map of nest sites in the buildings of the town and work with residents to help preserve them. Happily, this involves watching the birds for hours at a time.
The show gets going shortly after I arrive. Having foraged disparately through the day, the birds band together in “screaming parties” – tightly packed formations of up to a dozen swifts that speed madly around trees and rooftops, slalom within inches of chimney pots, or snap suddenly around some invisible axle like a stunt kite, the finely sliced air whooshing behind them. It’s all done to the sound of those instantly recognisable calls – a scraped-marble screech, released in showers of noise as they tear around.
Just as the sun sets, I look up higher into the sky to see a 50-strong swarm seething high above the river. As the light fades, they disperse, some presumably ascending to 10,000 feet to sleep on the wing. Swift lives are relentlessly aerial, and they can stay airborne for 10 months or more, outpacing predators and pathogens.
Others fly down to their young. I watch carefully and log the nest sites. The speeding birds leave deceleration to the last possible millisecond before vanishing under the eaves of the Victorian terrace.
Swifts breed among us, which makes them acutely vulnerable to our actions. Terrifyingly, we have lost more than half of our breeding swifts since 1995. But they are a paradox; despite their physical proximity, many aspects of their long-distance, high-altitude, high-speed lives still elude our understanding. They are the wild, mysterious, more-than-human world right in our midst, and we should treasure them.
