Swift summer is coming to a close
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AND then, just like that, it is August. In our global plague year, time is a strangely elastic concept (as it is with me at the best of times) spooling and stretching out; twanging when you least expect it.
High above Hungerford’s wide High Street, the glittering chalk stream and drowsy canal, there is a last screaming party of 20 swifts.
They scythe the air in a glancing peloton, flashing on the turns, climbing and rounding corners of the sky and air we can only imagine, skimming the undulating roofs of the bookshop and the commoner’s houses, climbing and slicing ellipses and serpentines in the thick, heady air above the cows on the common, clustered head to tail around the stone water trough.
As you read this, they may already have left.
For a bird that announces its arrival with fairground screams, it leaves so quietly. It is an old expected going.
Yet increasingly, each letting go seems harder; comes with an uneasiness at the way we treat our relationship with nature. Did we, are we doing enough? In the news, our new appreciation of nature jostles with the behaviour of others that seem to be able to simultaneously enjoy and wreck it in the most obvious ways, walking away from their own detritus as if it has nothing to do with them.
Last week’s first Red List of UK
Mammals makes for desperate reading, with a quarter of our wildlife vulnerable to extinction, including harvest mice, water voles and hedgehogs.
I was interviewed last week with David Lindo ‘The Urban Birder’ and Steve Masters, Green councillor for Speen, who is currently working from a treehouse on the route of HS2.
A project that is already in danger of becoming obsolete, in our ‘new future’, it is criminally ecologically and culturally damaging and expensive, let alone financially so (£56bn in 2015 to £107bn 2020).
Even as the morning’s newly-fledged wrens drop out of the ivy, and brand new goldfinch chicks visit the birdbath for the first time, and yellowhammers, blackbirds and thrushes are still raising late broods in the hedge, a neighbour’s hedge trimmer starts up.
We make refugees of our wildlife in almost everything we do.
After a socially-distanced family gathering, a furnace sunset burns under the copper beech.
A glow of molten steel before it fizzles out in the cooling bucket of night.
Perhaps the swifts will have gone with it. As Tim Dee, the brilliant writer of Greenery, says “it never looks like an exit”.
And as Edward Thomas said, it is “as if the bow went off with the arrow… all of us gone out of the reach of change”.
Wild Diary
Please. Don’t cut your hedges yet. Maybe snip the stray briars and wait til the end of the month.
Our birds are precious few enough.