A Connecting Thread

swifts
Originally uploaded by wherethewolvesare.

Swifts seem to be a connecting thread throughout my life at the moment. I seem to see them wherever I am. Not tens or hundreds of them, just two, three or four, and not for long either, but enough to know they’re there. As I was laid on my back lawn watching clouds go by, one warm evening this week, all of the airborne insect-eaters (swift, swallow and house martin) flew through my patch of sky. On my way to work, as I drove past a field of poppies at Barwick, swifts flashed in front of my car. From my window at work in Armley, the unmistakable black sickle shapes screamed over the school field. (I even saw them on the way to the chip shop in Rothwell).

I can’t help being fascinated by swifts. Aside of their speed and agility, they lead an extraordinary life, almost entirely on the wing. At night, swifts fly thousands of feet up and sleep as they glide. They can travel many miles during the night, yet at the speed they fly they can be back where they started in next to no time. Swifts mate in flight and then need to build nests on ledges and other high places so that they can drop from the nest, in order to get up the speed needed to fly, so much so that a grounded swift will shortly be a dead swift, unable to take to the air from the ground. And then there’s the chicks to feed, a swift can fly thousands of miles in one trip to find enough food for the chicks. Whilst mum and dad are away, the chicks can go into a kind of torpor, slowing their metabolic rate down, to survive for up to ten days without food.

Swifts head back to Africa fairly early compared to other migrants, any time from August onwards. It’s for this reason that the last swift you see is one of the harbingers of autumn being used by the BBC’s Autumnwatch. Until then, I’ll be listening for those piercing screams and looking out for that characteristic black silhouette and flickering flight. Perhaps I won’t need to, they’ll come to me.