Common Ground (25 page)

Later, cup of tea in hand, I'm locking up the front door when a gang of them screeches past, returning to their nests for the night. In social or territorial displays they've been known to clock up 130 miles per hour, which sets me off wondering, abstractly, if a swift has ever sprung a speed camera. Unlikely, I'm sure, but then again I've seen them crop up on TV shows before, sneaking into shot on primetime soap operas and documentaries, even photo-bombing frontline war correspondents. Naturalist Richard Mabey wrote of being struck by an unavoidable allegory about types of existence after seeing a swift flash past the commentator during a report on the shelling of Beirut in the 1980s.
²
And, tragically, this isn't a rare occurrence – neither the shelling nor communities, and swifts, getting caught up in it. Recently I saw a journalist midway through a bulletin from Libya being buzzed by that same telltale shape, his voice momentarily drowned out by that unmistakable cry:
seeeeee-seeeee, seeeeee-seeeeee
. I knew instantly what Mabey was talking about – that juxtaposition of gruesome, human-wrought horror and life-affirming nature. The coincidental sound of the swift's plea seemed to bring the madness of blowing up neighbourhoods filled with civilians into even starker relief. As though we've become so corrupted that even other species are petitioning us to pause and take a look at ourselves.

There's a chance, of course, that the swifts on our street are being purposefully recorded. Numbers have fallen by as much as a third over the last decade and much work is going into understanding this recent decline. Perhaps satellite tags bound around their barely-legs are drawing digital flight maps on a scientist's computer screen somewhere. Maybe their returning tonight will trigger specially rigged ‘nest cams' into record mode. Such dedication has helped us move on from the days when we believed swifts and swallows spent winter hibernating in the mud beneath ponds. Yet for all the insight our surveillance society can provide, the maps and methods with which swifts navigate their world are surely as nuanced, complex and hidden as our own. Much is hardwired in that little brain and body. You see innate urges beginning to manifest on those silent, black-and-white nest cams. At around a month old, swift chicks begin this curious routine of pushing themselves up onto their wing tips and holding up their bodies, as if doing press-ups or a core-strengthening Pilates move. The theory is that, before even experiencing flight, they are programmed to prepare for it because once they slip through that narrow aperture into the sky they won't return to the nest. In fact, they will be airborne for a minimum of two, three, perhaps even four years until reaching maturity, mating and first nesting themselves. Depending on how late in the summer they fledge, they may even leave for Africa straight away, fresh from the nest, untutored, possessing the supreme means to plunge into the unknown.

The precise
hows
of migration still hover at the edge of our understanding, although we can be fairly sure of certain things. Swifts interact instinctively with their environment, navigating by registering minute changes in light, airflow, moisture, pressure and magnetic forces. Direction, location and altitude are determined through the position of the sun, the stars and the earth's magnetic field, which, although invisible to us, wraps around the planet from pole to pole like a ball of wool. Birds are believed to be capable of detecting it via molecules in their eyes, beaks and neurons in their inner ears. Researchers think it may even appear as a cluster of stationary spots in their vision, like having an arrow permanently pointing north. As I click off the lights and climb the stairs to bed that night, it strikes me that the maps of the swifts' world must feature augmented layers too. Geographic adaptations that make sense to individual birds, repeat patterns consigned to memory, ‘regional' maps that bear no resemblance to what's on the ground but which join together physical landmarks like mountain ranges and rivers with other waypoints and markers of the mind – the place where their nest was once blown to smithereens by an artillery shell, the spot where a flying termite swarm gathers yearly. Who knows? Perhaps when crossing some barren desert they feel the pull of those ever-churning concrete circles at Bilton sewage works. It's true that we're all only ever passing through this world, but part of being alive is that magical process of making it our own.

Here's the thing: in an era when there can seem to be a deficit of wonder, swifts are like the sky: once you start, you can't stop wondering about them. Frustratingly, though, their elusiveness and pace mean you rarely get more than a glimpse of what they are up to in a town. The edge-land, however, reveals a wider perspective. From under the lone oak tree there are vast uninterrupted evening skies in every direction; I can follow their sky-slicing insect frenzies for far longer, into dusk, into the dark. So, I start to return here too, conducting my own nighttime sorties from the nest again.

I like to think the flocks congregating above me are made up, at least in part, of the swifts from our street. I have a hunch they are taking a similar route down here to me, wheeling up out of the lines of terraces and crossing the ring road, flying down Bilton Lane, over the nest-free realms of the modern housing estates, to reach the insect-rich air above the scraps of woods, meadows and watercourses of the fringes. If we could compare them, I bet the jumble of lines on our internal maps would look pretty similar right now. In any case, they are feeding relentlessly, which I hope is a sign of chicks being born. I've tried to gather more direct evidence. The other day I stood listening for their mousy cheeps outside number 25 just below where a mating pair kept sweeping in and out in a tag-team sequence, but the street noise was too loud. After a few minutes of staring at the eaves, squinting and straining to hear, I realised a woman was looking down from a window. She had a genuine look of concern and a phone in her hand. I sloped off, over-acting that I'd had something in my eye, trying to look inconspicuous.

Sometimes on these balmy evenings, the swifts appear to be momentarily stacked in the hot, flat air like planes circling, waiting for runway clearance. But they are feeding still up there. Swifts will hunt at different altitudes for different prey: gnats, beetles, aphids, ladybirds, flies, moths, mosquitoes and tiny airborne spiders drifting on spun threads, designed to catch the wind. If it sounds like a varied diet, it's because it needs to be. Swifts are thought to disgorge up to forty meals a day to their young, collecting and consuming somewhere between 20,000 and 50,000 insects every twenty-four hours, packing them into dense, gobstopper-like balls that puff out their throats and cheeks. Yet more staggering statistics; yet more reasons you'd pray for this bird in your hand during a game of ornithological Top Trumps.

I see none of these details, though. All I see are the birds gathering then uncoiling like a knot of black rope, buzzing, zipping and tumbling through the sky. They tack and turn, firing off victory falsettos, trawling in such numbers that it confounds the eyes. As though stirred by their dynamism, the wheat shifts too, waving like a festival crowd one moment and then swirling back into stillness again – forming a surface of gold that rolls, ripples and slides towards town. Watching it, I think about something I haven't in years, the way oil paint moves under a brush. There were a few of us at school to whom the art department was a place to escape to. It was situated, as all art departments should be, in a garret above the sports hall, away from the main buildings and the business of education. It smelled of coffee, tobacco, heated Perspex, hot, cut wood and turpentine, and we chose to spend lunchtimes there, in amongst those smells. We were sixteen years old, learning how to use oils on board, squeezing it from metal tubes and chasing it into thick, wet blooms of life as the grey-stained clouds of north Leeds rolled across the department's windows. It was long before we knew of surface-focused postmodernism and that texture could be art itself. We sought
real life
in everything and spent hours manipulating blues, greens, browns and yellows into landscapes beyond the city; landscapes to be marked on their likeness to the real thing. Watching the patterns of swifts and breeze moving through the sky and wheat field, I see now that we were recording reality more accurately than we knew. Beneath the final layer of our finished works, now probably painted over, skipped or thick with dust somewhere, those fluid whirls mirrored exactly the way the landscape, the sky, all of us, exist in perpetual motion. If only I could go back and tell myself.

At 8:30 p.m. the next day, I walk out in boots, shorts and T-shirt, carrying only a notebook and pen, and after a hundred yards I am already too warm. The evening is ecstatic. The earth hums in octaves. Only the lane smells of damp, old caravans; arid, tinder-dry air presses everywhere else, even deep in the wood. Wave meets wave on the fields – wheat and insects merge and split. The birds are in their element: the swallows rattle and click like bats, cresting the crops and banking around the trees and pylons; the swifts sky-scrawl in the gassy blue. From the lone oak I can see for miles, off towards burnished moor, ridge and wood. Further, to where pale purple bleeds into sky. The sense of scale is difficult to absorb and harder still when I crane my neck up to watch the swifts, now so aloof and aloft. After an hour or so the sky behind them grows tufted with the wispy brushstrokes of cirrus; ice crystals zooming over town at 300 miles per hour or more and yet seeming so slow, almost stationary to my eyes. The drawing-down of the day blushes these white and grey filaments into reds and glowing gold, and the blue behind dims, like a curtain being drawn over the horizon. Another hour and the swifts are little more than misted dots against it all, gnat-sized in my binoculars, being recalled back to the heavens. They look like they're falling upwards, as though gravity has been reversed. Their sound fades skywards. Eventually they are indecipherable and, as if each was a drop of black dye passing through the cotton clouds, the cirrus darkens too.

And they will float up there all night in that cooling, loosening air, dozing on the wing. That's what I shake my head at as I walk home and, waiting to cross the ring road, glance up at the sky. A pair of flashing wing tips blip smoothly overhead through semi-blackness.
Somewhere between me and that plane, swifts are bedding down
. Between the sprawl and the EasyJets, they make nests in the air. Of all the impressive traits this bird possesses, surely this has to be the most extraordinary. When not nesting, whether migrating or over territory, swifts rest by climbing into high altitude – up to around 10,000 feet – and enter into a state called ‘unihemispheric slow-wave sleep'. A neurotransmitter shuts off half their brain, keeping the other half functioning and alert to changes in wind and drift, ensuring the bird wakes up where it fell asleep. Or, if migrating, squarely on course. The left side shuts down first before swapping with the right, an alternation thought to be responsible for the bird's gentle swaying motion through the air as it rests, swinging like a baby rocked in a cradle.

Unbelievably, nearly a hundred years before this nocturnal rest-flight could be proven scientifically through satellites and tagging, an encounter had already occurred between human and swifts in this semi-dormant state. In his 1956 monograph,
Swifts in a Tower
, biologist David Lack recalls the experience of a French pilot in the First World War coasting with his engines off over enemy lines – an account that Lack notes was written-off for decades as ‘absurd': ‘As we came to about 10,000 feet, gliding in close spirals with a light wind against us, and with a full moon, we suddenly found ourselves among a strange flight of birds which seemed to be motionless, or at least showed no noticeable reaction. They were widely scattered and only a few yards below the aircraft, showing up against a white sea of clouds underneath … We were soon in the middle of the flock, in two instances birds were caught and on the following day I found one of them in the machine. It was an adult male swift.'

That faint and final
seeeeee-seeeee, seeeeee-seeeeee
. Yes, yes, I do see now, but the more you see, the more you want to know. That's the quandary. The more the maps seem to interlace and overlay. It all makes it harder to imagine them leaving. Then, one morning, you step through the front door and it's that time – the
turning
time. The moment the season creaks on its hinge and, by chance, you overhear. The start of a slowly spoken countdown; the intake of breath before summer's auctioneer yells, ‘Going, going … gone.' Outside it appears someone has messed with the contrast and everything has become a little more light and shade. Leaves have darkened from the greens of new lawns and fresh limes to the hue of classic cars, a deeper, richer hunter-green, forest-green. Goodwood and old tapestries. It's hard to put your finger on it exactly. The heat and glare of the sun are just as stifling; the air bright and blissfully undiluted by icy northern winds; the leaves still weeks or months away from falling; summer holidays barely in full swing and yet, it's
there
, agitating the senses, a blur in the heat-hazed horizon, a shift in that swirling brushstroke, a tint to the palette.

In a normal year this is also the moment the swifts disappear. They are masters of ‘ghosting' – the Hollywood-favoured technique for getting talked about by leaving a party early and without a fuss, slipping through the back door in the wee hours without so much as an air-kiss goodbye. The art of tactical absence. Fledglings tend to go first, followed by the adults and, before you know it, the whole party's on the wind-down. The streets are immediately lonelier. The traffic louder. The air dulled. Life is less interesting. And you stand there wondering why until, looking up, you notice empty sky.

I say ‘normal year' because the chicks on our street will fledge late this summer. Rain has caused delays. It's almost August now; my guess is that, even if they're being fattened up fast, they might not begin migration until early September. And selfish as it sounds, I'm glad they're going to be here a bit longer. They've come to mean more to me this time around. I know their disappearance is a necessary one, to linger once the insects fade and the frosts come would be a death sentence, but the thought of it hurts nonetheless. The coming and going of swifts are markers in the cycle of our year. Their departure, whenever it comes, augurs an ending.