‘Look! They’re back! Look!’

The swifts return to London

On Saturday I was walking through Windrush Square en route to see my friend Patrick at Bookmongers, his second-hand bookshop. I needed a book to keep me company for a big walk I am about to undertake.

At that moment my reveries were interrupted by a scream.

It was not the type of scream that would normally have put me on high alert in the centre of Brixton.

Rather it came from high up in the sky

It came from last summer, not this spring.

“It can’t be”, I thought. “It’s still April”.

I looked up and sure enough, there they were.

A dozen ‘black bows’ as the poet Edward Thomas called them.

The swifts were back.

Print by Kirsty Griffin

‘Are they too early?’, asked Ted Hughes in his eponymous poem¹.

It was written in the 70s and is date-stamped 15th May, more than two weeks hence.

But I didn’t care about the date.

My favourite birds were back from their winter break in southern Africa.

I call it a winter break but that’s where they have been for the past nine months of my life. Yes, I realise my view is both anthropomorphic and London-centric.

After spending the majority of the year feeding and sleeping on the wing, they are now back in the northern hemisphere, their breeding grounds. I say breeding grounds but they will also mate on the wing here. The swifts I saw, if they are one of the mature birds, will touch down on earth briefly, here on the British Isles. That’s good enough for me to call this their home.

I often wonder why they bother to grace us with their presence for a handful of weeks of the year. Surely they have everything they need ‘down south’. After all they can race recklessly round a continent or two in fine sunny weather, just for the hell of it.

Why run the risks of a 6,000 journey to find their favourite urban nesting site blocked up by home improvers, amongst the other obstacles we put in their way?

Spotted on Wormwood Scrubs

And why despite everything we throw at them do they always seem so joyful here?

As Richard Mabey says in his book Nature Cure, “you would need to have a very sophisticated view of pleasure to believe they weren’t ‘enjoying’ themselves”.

As I walked through Brixton that day, I wanted to button-hole passers-by and shake them from their digitally-induced torpor to look up from their phones.

I felt like intoning the words of Ted Hughes to them:

“They’ve made it again,

Which means the globe’s still working, the Creation’s

Still waking refreshed, our summer’s

Still all to come”.

But I knew where I would find a more receptive audience. Ironically, it was in the virtual world.

When I got back home I logged onto a swift lovers group on social media.

I knew the birds I had seen would not be sticking around in London.

Our city’s temporary residents would be in the rearguard that would be here in a couple of weeks.

These guys were heading north. And so it proved.

BTW 49 is a record number of likes for me on social media

I had a picture in my mind of the control room in ‘the Battle of Britain’, one of my beloved childhood films, with bulbs coming on in succession across a 3D map. Only this time it was not Luftwaffe bombers but squadrons of swifts fanning out across the country.

Incidentally it’s only recently that I have realised that French filmmakers overdub urban scenes with the screams of swifts as an unconscious signal to the viewer to say, ‘this is taking place in summer, in case you hadn’t guessed’.

The swift stands head and shoulders (an inapposite metaphor if ever there was one) above all other birds for me. That’s why they are in my logo.

With thanks to daughter Laura

After all, the swift was my gateway drug into nature.

That bitter but golden spring of the first lockdown in 2020 segued into the return of the swifts where I was.

I find it hard to believe now that they had passed unnoticed in my life till then but they literally burst onto the scene in Corinne’s cul-de-sac in Harlow.

As a new town of the 50s and 60s, its largely social housing stock had been neither ‘improved’ not hermetically sealed-up. The eaves and rafters of our little street provided just the nooks and crannies swifts need to nest in. And nest they did along those terraces.

And those that didn’t, the first years, the ‘screamers and knockers’ checking out nesting sites for future years, careened up and down, as if we were hosting “their evening dirt track meetings”.

When Corinne sold up in 2023 to return to London, I realised the swifts would one of the things I would miss most about Harlow. I see them in ‘screaming parties’ from the flat in Brixton in the height of the summer, but never at such close quarters, nor in such numbers as I saw in the Essex skies.

As Aldo Leopard wrote of swift migration in America:

‘An annual barter of food for light in which the whole continent receives as net profit a wild poem dropped from murky skies²’.

1. Quotes are from Ted Hughes ‘Swifts’ from his 1976 collection Season Songs unless otherwise stated.

2. Quoted by Richard Mabey in Nature Cure.