THE SOUND OF SUMMER
Raising your gaze to watch the swifts arrive for their British summer holiday is mesmerising, as these aerialists of the wild fill the air with piercing shrieks, says Cal Flyn
Cal Flyn bids farewell to the swifts as they fly off for winter
They arrived in the spring. You could hear them coming: rounding the bends like cars on a track, voices high and discordant, racing, shrieking. The swifts were here, and carried in their cries the first intimation of the summer to come. Ted Hughes wrote of swifts in a famous poem, of their ‘controlled scream of skid’ as they round the bends like race cars on a track; ‘their lunatic limber scramming frenzy’. They were welcome, he said, because their arrival proved that ‘the globe’s still working’ – the world keeps turning and the seasons keep arriving, no matter what seismic events are taking place in our personal lives.
«But it turns and turns. Now, as the days shorten, and the blackberries ripen, and the heavy-headed grass nods in the fields, the swifts are preparing to leave, and our swift summer will be over for another year.
«2021 has been many things, not all of them positive. But it has been a good year for swift appreciation. Two notable new books on the subject were published earlier this summer: Sarah Gibson’s« Swifts and Us, an account of their behaviour and ecology, as well as of encounters with those who study them; and Charles Foster’s«The Screaming Sky,«a paean to the bird and ‘an account of an obsession’, in which he reflects on what swifts have taught him about life as he follows their migration south.
«Charles remembers sitting in a field as a child, ‘looking up and seeing these things that were just so much faster, and more powerful, and so much more manoeuvrable than anything else I’d seen.’ He found his eyes lifting to the sky, ‘because they were so arresting; and in lifting my eyes, I saw perspectives that I’d never realised existed.’
‘The swifts were here, and carried in their cries the first intimation of the summer to come’