The Screaming Sky, by Charles Foster

RICHARD DAVENPORT-HINES The Screaming Sky

Charles Foster is a soulmate of William Blake.

‘He who would do good to another must do it in minute particulars,’ Blake wrote, ‘and not in generalising demonstrations of the Rational Power.’

Foster, too, begins his thoughtful, eloquent and beguiling book by condemning himself as a wretch for thinking in generic words and abstract ideas when the truth, he says, lies in the particular, minute details, fleshly reality and animal instincts.

Taxonomists who want to define and fix a name on everything seem bullying to him. Hasty ideas are folly, Foster says. Hurry is another word for cruelty.

There are facts aplenty in The Screaming Sky – some of them astounding. Swifts can live for up to 21 years. They have a high survival rate: perhaps 80 per cent survive from one year to the next.

Foster calculates that in a lifetime they may fly as much as 770,000 miles – the equivalent of more than three trips to the moon. They prey on 500 different species.

Swifts are fast gliders, whose flight Foster likens to falling perpetually forwards. They shiver rather than flap their wings. Young ones may land when they meet dangerous weather during migrations, but otherwise they leave the skies only to build nests when they are breeding.

‘To orientate and navigate, swifts probably use the stars, the sun, magnetite particles in their brains or their beaks, rivers, mountains, coastlines, pipelines, field boundaries and, like homing salmon, the scent of home. Since they oscillate between the hemispheres, they must have, at least in outline, a map of the night sky in both hemispheres embedded somewhere in their heads or their bowels.’

Foster writes in luxuriant pictures. When swifts reach Africa from Europe in October, they start to moult. ‘Fibreglass contaminated feathers … are now forced out like milk teeth and woven into the nests of mice.’ In the Congo River basin, ‘an oxpecker, plucking a leech from a hippo’s eyebrow, flaps and puts up a new crop of minute-old flies with glutinous bodies to fuel the swifts on their way back to English evensong’.

Elsewhere in Africa, swifts swoop on flies from the dung of herds of galloping zebra: in his words, ‘swirling black columns of insects rise from the bush like the pillars of a Satanic temple’.

In one of many tremendous passages of imagination and tenderness, Foster pictures a German hunter on a Namibian farm, relaxing after shooting a kudu, and knocking his pipe against a whistling thorn as he waits for a pick-up to collect his trophy.

Smouldering ash falls on dry earth under the tree. During the night, the breeze from the waving tail of a passing ground squirrel wafts the ash onto grass. A soft wind comes up with the sun and inflames the ash. ‘Before the fire ran Cape hares, jackals, elephant shrews, dik-dik and duiker; and before it slithered cobras and sand snakes; and legions of scorpion, too, their tails raised impotently to sting the fire back.’

In the blue smoke, hundreds of eastern swifts, which had recently

flown from Mongolia, begin ‘smokebathing’. Nobody knows why.

‘They spun, they somersaulted, they fluffed up their feathers, they shivered with what looked like intense pleasure, they burrowed to the heart of the smoke, so near to the crackling grass that I expected them to rise as balls of flame and seed other fires when they finally fell. This was high-energy luxuriating. I wonder if they held their breath.’

Or, in the Caspian Sea, ‘dead black and mirror-flat’, he sees the flickering image of swifts darker even than the water. These are a subspecies which breeds in the rafters and crannies of an imperial palace in Beijing. In China, they are regarded as the spirits of dead ancestors.

‘Tonight, they will feast in the foothills of Mount Ararat, and then play for a few days with the headwaters of the Tigris and Euphrates, before flying over Damascus, down the Jordan valley, over the Red Sea, and up the Nile.’

I learnt much from The Screaming Sky. Of the swifts that halt each year on their journey south where I live in Ardèche, in south-eastern France, some come from Denmark, others from the Netherlands and none from anywhere else. The Danes and the Dutch fly off from Ardèche on an identical route, perhaps etched into their instincts since the last ice age, to the Pyrenees. But they always leave one day apart.

A less pretty thought gleaned from The Screaming Sky, which I cannot budge from my head, is that 20 per cent of all meals in the United States are eaten in a car.