REFLECTIONS

EVERY YEAR I watch for the bird that comes last and retires the earliest, as John Clare put it, waiting for the avian aeronaut whose squealing directs my gaze upwards over the rooftops of nearby Saffron Walden. Glinting in early morning sun, soot-brown and pale-chinned, they pepper the sky, silvery underparts gleaming. Sickle-shaped long-winged fliers, gusting and playing, Swifts are never still for an instant, spiralling high into the skies where they vanish from sight, apparently preferring space to gravity, heaven to earth. Their genus Apus, ‘without feet’ (of course they have feet, but weak legs which inhibit lift-off), represents in heraldry the arms of a fourth son who is unlikely to inherit land: footloose, fancy-free perhaps, certainly with no foothold. For a grounded Swift is a dead Swift, unless helped back into flight (John Clare describes one he found: its legs was very short and muffled with feathers like a bantum [sic]) How fast they fly as they rise, arrows in a neverending dance, tiny specks disappearing into immense altitudes above the medieval roofline, grains of dust rising on thermals until they disappear from sight, leaving the blue sky empty. Then, later, as I return to my car in the pre-rush-hour quiet of the street, there they are again over the roofs, close to their nests in the eaves, chasing insects to feed their young. Swift facts are among the most arresting of the bird-world: a member of a family whose close relatives are the hummingbirds, Swifts fly on average 500 miles a day, clocking up two million miles in a lifetime that can span 30 years. That’s four times to the moon and back, reaching a top speed of 67 miles an hour and flying as high as two miles above the earth. For three years, the juveniles remain on the wing, without ever landing, from the moment of fledging until they mate and stop to nest, lay eggs, incubate and feed their young. The young feed from a bolus, a saliva-bound ball of anything up to 500 insects gathered into a pouch of the flying parent bird, situated just below the beak. Site-faithful, they pair for life, and sleep on the wing by closing down one half of the brain at a time in order to remain in flight while roosting. Some cultures call them ‘rain birds,’ Rain Swallows flying in front of a storm, feeding on insects caught in the updraughts. I have an abiding memory of watching Swifts on a trip to southern Macedonia a few years ago. Flying in to Thessaloniki to stay the night before driving onwards, we found our hotel along a narrow street,