Across the fields, the church bells chime midnight. It’s a hot July night and I haven’t moved for hours. Staring at the sky, I’m full of hope and awe, for out there is a beating heart that I know. One swift, now far, far away.
It is almost incomprehensible that a swift who slept in my bedroom for 17 days is flying through the night sky on a maiden journey that will keep her airborne for up to three years. This same bird that I first saw bedraggled by the heat and with twisted cobwebs around her feet is now part of the most elite flying club on Earth.
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To touch a swift is to connect our past, present and future. With bloodlines that trace back 50 million years, these birds belong to one of the most ancient orders on Earth. More than that, though, of the 10,000 or so avian species, swifts spend more time airborne than any other. To put finger to feather is to become so full of wonder that nothing else exists. But if such a moment takes place, it is because the bird is in peril.
Saving swifts
A few weeks ago, during a heatwave, a friend called me about a swift. Half an hour later, I was crouching over a cardboard box looking at it. A victim of the heat, it had fallen, jumped or been pushed from its cavity nest in the eaves or roof of someone’s house, far too early. To the untrained eye it looked grown, but the white edges of its wings and its light weight spelled baby.
I offered a wet cotton bud to its beak and the youngster snapped it up, staring at me with huge, dark eyes that looked like tiny planets. Through the panic, I formed a plan.
The swift’s Endangered status in Great Britain is due to loss of cavity-nesting habitat in buildings through renovations and insulation, and the fact that modern building materials are incompatible with its nesting needs. It’s ironic, considering that these birds adapted amazingly well to buildings after we felled the primeval forests they once nested in. The species has declined by more than 60 per cent since the 1990s, and it’s estimated that fewer than 40,000 pairs remain. Every individual matters.
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“I’ve got a swift; I’m going to put it in our bedroom,” I said to my husband, Robin, when I got home. I knew without looking that he’d be rolling his eyes, but our bedroom has the best view of the sky.
There are strict rules on caring for swifts. You need training to be a certified swift rehabilitator, and some wildlife rescue centres don’t take them on because they require so much attention.
Unfortunately, there were no swift rehabbers nearby and the wildlife centres were full. “You’re stuck with me,” I said, as I calculated how many days I might have the bird, the food it would need, and all the little, weird things that would dominate my routine until it was ready to fly.
The main thing would be food. Young swifts in care eat around 100 medium-sized crickets a day. In the wild, parents can feed their chicks up to 20,000 invertebrates, from money spiders to mosquitoes, all caught in the air and deposited into those gaping mouths. When raised by mere mortals, they need supplements, too, and wax worms for fat and water, but they are mostly ravenous for insect protein.
I put my hand near the swift and it nuzzled into my finger. I would never know whether it was female or male, but I had a hunch it was female. I gazed at her whiskers and eyelashes, made for desert crossings, making a promise to put my life on hold to rectify hers.
Some birds are visibly shaken when they encounter humans; others are not. When they seem relaxed, it is often because they are in need of care and have no energy, but this swift had a babyish, expectant attitude about her.
She didn’t look like she would be difficult to raise, but her needs were complex. She needed to gain a very specific amount of weight, and her primary feathers needed to reach a very specific length. If those two things didn’t happen, she’d never achieve the reason she was alive: to fly.
Building strength
Adult swifts fly non-stop for nine months every year, returning to the exact nest-site they left the previous August, which is the only ground they will ever intentionally touch as adults. Considering that they can live for more than 20 years, the oldest swifts will fly a distance equivalent to the moon and back, eight times.
I sat with the swift and put a tea towel in her box. She lowered her velveteen head into it, her crossed wings and tail protruding out and up like a toddler asleep. My messy, ordinary bedroom was now the most exciting place on Earth to me.
Every day revolved around singing crickets that I would have to feed her one by one, I carefully weighed the swift. She was only 24g, and needed to be at least 38g, so the rest of my life jolted to a halt.
I set up my computer next to her. I moved her box away from the window in the heat of the day, but put it back so she could study the sky. Her eyes would follow a butterfly or a bee flying past and she would instinctively open her mouth to grab it. Her attention pricked at all birds, too, and she would cower from the big ones.
When I put my hand next to her, she would shuffle over and climb me, snuggling into my chest. One day, lazing half asleep, she let out a winnowing purr. When I stroked her head, the sound grew louder. There was no doubt: this bird was content, and this led to the revelation that swifts purr. Her eyes drooped and her winnow got louder as her body relaxed into mine.
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When she was awake, she preened herself, running her bill down the top of her wings. Her wings were out of bounds to me, but her chin was safe to touch. She loved the little strokes, grooming my fingers in return.
Most of all, though, we watched the sky. “One of us will fly into that sky,” I whispered to her. “One of us will know what it is to soar above this house and fly thousands of miles, over the Sahara and into Africa, and to see rainforests from above.”
If I did anything wrong, I could hinder her destiny. I read every guideline I could find, jotting down the tally of crickets and wax worms eaten, the supplements given, her weight each morning, the type of poos and their regularity, how much she was sleeping and the length of her primary feathers. I washed my hands and arms like a surgeon, cut up crickets like a butcher, calculated her food and weight like a chemist and stroked her like a mother. The magic wing length was 15cm. Each day she grew.
After a fortnight, she started to give the telltale signs of preparing to fly, wrenching her body off the ground using her wings. When she wasn’t doing these press-ups, she was preening furiously. My enjoyment waned as the pressure grew. When she was ready to fledge, she would need the right conditions: open space and no strong wind.
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Perhaps most impotently, though, she needed height. Naturally, swifts fledge from their nest sites under housing eaves, but a rehabber simply takes their swift to open fields, places the bird on their hand, lifts it skywards and lets it go. No throwing is involved, nor should be. If the bird wants, and is able to, it will fly.
Releasing the swift
On day 16, Robin and I took the swift to a nearby meadow. I lifted her out of the box and raised my hand towards the sky. I could feel her heart rate increase. She looked around, but her instinct to fledge was not kicking in. In fact, her instinct not to fledge was playing out instead, as she bowed her head into my fingers. I lowered my hand and she tried to crawl into my sleeve. I held her for a moment, feeling her body relax. “OK. We will go home,” I said.
The next morning, we tried again, and the same thing happened. That day she slept and slept, buried under the tea towel, unmoving for hours. When I fed her, she refused the crickets but took a few wax worms, and then slept on my chest. She wasn’t quite ready yet.
It happened that evening. An hour before dusk, the sky tinted with a pink sheen, 30 swifts screamed above the rooftops, flying circuits at breakneck speed. The swift’s eyes fixed on the black shapes and together we watched from the bedroom window.
There was a new energy about her, a subtle restlessness that bloomed into vigorous press-ups. I lifted her onto the windowsill and she immediately crawled to the glass and pressed against it, wings open, staring to the sky. She had never done that before.
Robin walked in. “She’s ready, now,” I said. “Can you stand in the road and stop any traffic, so she has a clear passage?”
Robin hurried down and gave me a thumbs-up. I lowered my hand to the swift, and she crawled on. We were seconds from the most important moment in her life so far. She was steady, but the adrenaline made me feel sick as I opened the window.
“Go fly,” I whispered, opening my hand slowly. I knew that this time she would go, our bond severed as her wings spread. She positioned herself, looking at the swifts above and at the flight course she had been studying for 17 days. And without hesitation, she flew.
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I held my breath as she climbed steeply into the sky, her flightpath clear, into the screaming welcome of the others. Flapping her wings hard to start with, she eased into a rhythm and joined the swirl. For 20 minutes, tears flooding my face, I watched her, until I lost track of which one she was. For a further hour I watched them all, embracing her new anonymous, wild identity.
As July turned to August, the sky wrapped a shroud of melancholy around the summer. It was a silence that clattered down, leaving me bereft as the sky emptied of swifts. I thought of my bird’s return in 1,000 days’ time.
I scanned the night skies for the Perseids, the highlight of the meteor calendar in Britain. Each meteor emphasised the depth of the sky, the light show appearing to originate from the constellation of Perseus, but actually caused by Earth hurtling through the debris left behind by the Swift-Tuttle comet.
I smiled at the thought. Some swifts, like mine, were experiencing their first-ever migrations, while others were making a familiar journey. All were commuters whose route was lit up, not by streetlamps, but by meteors made by their namesake, in a life that would see them travel over continents and above the biggest desert on Earth, braving storms and talons, only to come all the way back to our shared homes.
Top image: common swift in flight. Credit: Mirceax/Getty Images
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