A Single Swallow

by Horatio Clare

  Rick speaks in that lovely, easy, irresistible-to-imitate South African accent beloved of British impressionists. You can hear his English heritage in it, his South African soul and the way he thinks. In my British ears African voices change English from water into wine.

  The air was full of birds which Rick began to name: Pearl-Breasted Swallows, which shine like crescent moons (their dark, dark blue teaches you to see their fiery white); Greater Striped Swallows, which have longer tails and rufous speckled chests; Little Swifts, and many other flying creatures.

  ‘It’s like being born again,’ I said. ‘I know them all in Britain, pretty well, but here . . .’

  I fell in love with birds at the age of seven or so: crows, ravens and buzzards were my first subjects. I began a list then, which all birdwatchers have somewhere, of all the species I could identify. By the age of fourteen the list was up in the hundreds, and I had seen my first rarities, like the Water Rail, a wonderfully retiring marsh bird, and Red Kites, which in those days could only be found in the very middle of Wales. Bird-watching abroad, on holidays to France or Italy, was always a disorientating business. Seeing most of the birds of Britain was one thing – something finite, which you could work towards – but on the continent you had to start again. And without knowing the culture of these new bird worlds, you could not really tell how excited you should be: Bee-Eaters and Rollers and Hoopoes seemed amazingly exotic and seductive, when I saw them in the Midi, but were they rare? Avocets were very special in Britain, but in the Camargue they were as common as magpies.

  We went to Rick’s university, pausing between students playing cricket and a reed bed to watch Red Bishops, fat little birds like shots of pure crimson. We sat on a terrace, moving under cover as the storm we had seen brushed the edge of Bloemfontein, and I filled the back of my notebook with Rick’s expertise.

  ‘We can track where they have been feeding by trace elements in their feathers, like iron, aluminium and calcium. The proportions present in a given area are found in the plants, and then in the insects, and then in the swallows. It’s a wonderful thing because it is so unintrusive: you just need a tiny section of one pin’ (‘pin’ from pinion, meaning feather).

  The process is in its infancy because so little of the earth has been chemically analysed in this way, but there was a thrilled expansion in Rick’s gestures as he described the possibility of actually mapping the journeys of a single swallow, and therefore those of thousands of swallows. Flipping open a laptop he displayed a hoard of data, an immaculately tabulated treasure, three years of results from his swallow-ringing project.

  There were nationalities beyond nationality – Bloemfontein birds had been found everywhere from Cork to Transylvania, and then they had come back, and gone again, flying at speeds we can only estimate.

  ‘Twenty-seven days!’ Rick pointed at one line of a spread-sheet, ‘Incredible isn’t it? And that’s assuming she was ringed the day she left and caught here the day she arrived.’

  We marvelled at ages – first-year, third-year, sixth-year – distances, and death rates.

  ‘Seventy per cent,’ he said, soberly. ‘In their first two years, 70 per cent mortality.’

  I tried to imagine the corpses. Hundreds and hundreds of thousands of them.

  ‘Oh yes, and it only takes three days of winter here to kill them.’

  ‘Three days?’

  ‘Yes, if they stay too long, by the second day of rain they have no energy to hunt, by the third they’re in the mud and they can’t get up. I get calls every year from farmers – they say “There are swallows everywhere, on the ground, have they been poisoned? What can I do?” The temperature only has to fall a few degrees, with rain, and that’s it.’

  We drove down to Rick’s house, and he showed me around. There was a bit of wilderness, just beyond his garden fence, not too dangerous, not too developed, where he would normally expect to see swallows. No swallows. Here was where his wife and children would be, normally, though today they were having a brei – a barbeque – at his mother-in-law’s.

  ‘It’s OK!’ he reassured me, smiling quietly, as I worried I was dragging him away.

  ‘My wife understands how important this is for me . . . talking about swallows, talking to other birdwatchers.’

  We called in, briefly, on Rick’s mother-in-law. I shook hands with his wife and said hello to their little girl.

  ‘You’re very lucky,’ he said, where we stopped next, at a petrol station on a corner, opposite a house surrounded by trees, with swallows painted on the garden wall. ‘There used to be so many of them roosting here that people would come in coaches to see them. Then they abandoned it, and we didn’t know where they were, but just a couple of weeks ago I found them . . .’

  ‘How many?’

  ‘Impossible to say!’ he laughed. ‘About 1.8 million.’

  ‘What!’

  ‘Approximately . . .’

  Later he said: ‘I was taught by a great man. He said, if you want to be a good birdwatcher, when you hear a bird, go and find the bird. That way you will know its call.’

  ‘And how did you get into them in the first place?’

  ‘I was very young and I just remember looking across the garden at a dark green hedge and there was this beautiful thing, so amazing . . .’

  He described a bird I have not seen, which sounded as though it was made of red and gold and green and white, the name of which I tried to remember, and on which he gently corrected me: a Double-Collared Sunbird.

  We drove to a place near a river, with tall, tall blue gum trees. It was a brooding evening of towering clouds. The light faded as gently as falling leaves.

  ‘Lesser Kestrels!’ he said.

  They came home in flocks, from very high up and far away, dropped down as though stooping on prey and settled themselves, sweetly, in barred ranks, like sheaves of little darts.

  ‘I really must do this more often,’ Rick murmured, as if reminding himself of something one cannot forget. I think he meant standing alone, with no thought for anything but the present. After a while we jumped quietly back into the bakkie and set off on our next adventure. Rick checked his watch, glanced at the sky, and frowned. Birds had begun to disappear and we had yet to see a single Barn Swallow.

  ‘We’ve left it late,’ Rick murmured, half to himself, as the bakkie accelerated. And so we were in a race now, as the light spiralled down and Rick spun us with increasing urgency through the suburbs. One moment too late and we would find nothing but a forest of dark reeds, screaming with chatter. Two moments too late and all would be silence. Three moments too late . . . Rick had another worry.

  ‘It’s used as a cut-through by all sorts of people – it’s not exactly secure – so when we came ringing here a couple of weeks ago I made some calls and got some security. Just so that we could get on with it without worrying too much. We were very quiet but . . .’ He did not look ashamed, just saddened by the truth of this. We were heading down towards a wasteland, the kind you find in any town anywhere, except here anyone could theoretically kill anyone and the world would have to say you had asked for it.

  ‘. . . they may have . . . they may have gone down to the other side of the . . .’

  Not the security: the swallows. The suburbs were thinning now and I knew we must be close.

  ‘You just see them,’ Rick said. ‘There are a few people, students and colleagues, who would call me at dusk to say “I saw them going this way at this time”, and then I got this sort of hunch and I looked at the map and I saw this place . . . I thought “I wonder . . .”’

  We both kept bobbing our heads down to look up. I could not tell if he really thought we were too late.

  ‘There!’ he said.

  ‘Oh yes! And there!’

  As my excitement and disbelief mounted, his began to relax. The conjuror had done it.

  ‘Another one – and there!’

  ‘You’ll start seeing quite a few,’ he said, as I bounced in th
e passenger seat like a dog in a forest of flying squirrels.

  They were coming in from all points of the compass now. It was not possible, it will never be, to know how many ‘nationalities’ there were. How quickly the air filled.

  What is it like to stand under all those nations, all those experiences, under all those guesses, those eyes? You begin to try to see them all but you cannot see, you can only feel. Then, since guessing is impossible, you begin to know.

  You know they have not finished eating. You feel the air devoid of midges. You hear the snap of their bills as they slide sideways, just missing your head, you feel the wind as one goes over your shoulder – snap! A bill shuts like a snicking trap-door. You half-hear, half-feel the hiss of the hunter’s wake.

  ‘When we were ringing we barely got bitten,’ Rick grinned.

  We had pulled up and stopped and walked a little way, over churned ground and debris. Ahead were the reed beds; water and vegetation covering an area about the size of two twisted rugby pitches. Behind us were trees, and, scattered round about, the fenced edges of different settlements. The air all around us stormed with silent wings. Sometimes we raised our binoculars. A man trudged by, not seeming to take much notice of the swallows, glancing blankly at us. Perhaps we looked like security.

  And though no one killed anyone, all around us there was a mighty harvest of death. No swallow hit any other, of course, though they did not fly like starlings, or geese, or jackdaws, or waders, or any other species you can watch wheeling and whirring in thousands, in tune. Instead they seemed to delight in chaos, charging zig-zag into space which was at once empty and full, as though playing chicken with physics. They filled all the air our eyes could afford them in every conceivable direction. Our words deserted us again.

  Chaucer, the poet at the fountainhead of English literature, puts the swallow in a strange place in relation to men and birds. His ‘Parlement of Foules’ is a poetic tour around the Garden of Love, with Chaucer as a visitor and the Roman general Scipio Africanus as his guide, at least as far as the gate. It is St Valentine’s Day. Scipio pushes the worried poet (protesting he knows nothing of love) into the garden, where he finds all the birds of the world, summoned by Nature to choose their mates. Chaucer’s tour of the characters and appetites of different birds is at once caustic, incisive and affectionate. In a broadly feudal, pyramidal food-chain (noble eagles at the top, countless seed-eaters down below) there is a hot, gluttonous cormorant, a ‘waker’ (watchful, wakeful) goose and a ‘cukkow ever unkynde’. But among all the ‘foules of ravyne’ (ravenous raptors) and the lesser thieves, foes and destroyers of their preys, there is only one murderer.

  The swalown, mordrer of the flyes smale

  That maken hony of floures fresshe of hewe.

  Chaucer places it between the nightingale, which he credits with calling forth the new green growth of leaves, and the ‘wedded’ turtle dove, ‘with heart so trewe’. Between the bird we prize most for its art and one we idealise for its faith, in a couplet which encapsulates a cycle of life and death, is the swallow, living by the murder of littler things which here are positively angelic, doing no harm more than making honey from fresh flowers. It seems a dreadfully human predicament.

  Now the birds were black flecks against dark twilight, white sparks against black-green reeds, dull red blood-spots shooting close by us, as if they were eating the light.

  ‘Far side!’ Rick said. He kept helping me direct my binoculars. It was dizzying looking over there, across the dulled water to the reeds opposite. Biblical plagues of the birds, denser than locusts, thicker than blood-spatter, making a sound we could barely hear but clearly see: a hissing, darting, scything thing, a terror. And then they began to come down. Entire dark whirlwinds, funnelling down into reeds. Was it fear, or thrill, or blind hive-mindedness that made them unscrew themselves from the sky like that, so hectically?

  ‘There was an Eagle Owl that used to come,’ Rick had said, at the abandoned roost. ‘It used to just charge in and out of the flocks until it wasn’t hungry.’

  ‘They’re going, over there!’ he exclaimed, and then mused, eyes stuck to his binoculars. ‘Perhaps because last time . . .’

  The ringing again. But even so close to us, where the nets had been, the swallows returned. We saw it and felt it. The reeds must have been 3 metres high and they shook and rattled, amplifying the rustling of wings. At a guess – there is a birdwatcher’s method of estimating dots (you close your eyes and see how many you can recall in a glimpsed area, then multiply the area until it covers the space you imagine the flock filled) – eight hundred or so came down just to our left.

  The reeds snaked away, thick as shadow, into the gloom that surrounded the water. They chattered and swayed and gradually silenced. A little wind and some insects returned. I got a bite and stumblingly lit a fag. Rick smiled, blinking at me from behind his glasses. He hauled out a cool-box and swept the tops off two beers. I toasted him in acknowledgement of this master-stroke. We had no fear any more.

  Rick dropped me off at the Hobbit hole and we shook hands. I had no way of thanking him adequately but we had concocted a cunning plan to save face: roughly £70 pounds was worth 1,000 rand, which would buy a great many bird rings.

  I had not dared mention, indeed I had forgotten, that while we were out England were playing Wales at Twickenham. I remembered now, and threw myself upstairs.

  We had had a day, the swallows now had a night (and for some of them, the future possibility of that little manacle, human interest) and Wales, it turned out, had had England, superbly, freakishly, in the second half. The Supersports channels were so delighted with the defeat, rather than the victory, that they devoted a lot of the next twelve hours to it.

  The timbre of their commentary was ‘How the heck did the English have the nerve to face us in the final of the World Cup three months ago when they can’t even beat a bunch of whippersnappers like Wales? Disgusting!’

  My phone chirruped and buzzed with the celebrations of family and various friends. One called me, knowing perfectly well I was in Africa, and conversed as if I too was in a London pub and had just seen the game.

  ‘Talk to you next weekend,’ he said, happily, ringing off. We would be playing Scotland then.

  CHAPTER 2

  Namibian Roads

  Namibian Roads

  THE COUCAL IS a portly bird with a long tail, like a fat cuckoo, and in Namibia the song of the Coucal heralds rain, they say. Two months ago, writing a piece for a travel magazine, I had been in a small plane flying over Namibia when the November rains came. The swallows would have been arriving then. We heard the Coucal in the morning, its bubbling, burbling cry, and in the afternoon we flew towards the storm. In the distance they were white clouds, blackening as we droned nearer. The storm-scope on the instrument panel flashed orange, then red. We pulled our straps tight, and then we were in it. Rain, rain like an elephant’s legs, with a rainbow for a trunk. The land flashed, misted and darkened where the huge feet fell. We threaded between columns of water and thunder; the squalls were headless silver giants, 11,000 feet tall, striding westwards with walking-sticks of lightning. We flew down a dark tunnel through an arch of lightning.

  In Zulu myth the underworld, hidden in the ground beneath us, and in the mountains, is the realm of cannibals. One story has a swallow carrying a bolt of lightning which breaks open rocks and frees the cannibals’ captives. When you have seen the southern rain, the apocalyptic, smoking towers of water and thunder, it makes perfect sense that swallows, arriving at the same time, would be heralded as lightning birds; breakers of rocks.

  Now I drove back across the Free State, then across the northern Cape, singing, through furious rainstorms, towards Upington on the Orange River. When it rains in Africa the sea seems to fall from the sky. Under the downpour at ground level you feel like a mosquito under a pressure hose. The water crashes down and bounces back off the ground in a kind of boiling mist. It seems impossible that anything as sm
all and fragile as a swallow could survive it. They must either navigate around the storms, as we did in the small plane, or they must take shelter. When the rains pass the insects come out and the birds too, hunting and crying out, in a kind of survivors’ banquet of celebration.

  I was happy alone now; I felt changed. I learned to count in hundreds of kilometres in place of hours; I nearly died when a sudden wind, a dipping corner and the speed of the car had combined for an instant to spin my life like a coin. In Upington I found heat, real heat, for the first time. I had shaved that morning; sweat and sun-cream acidly scoured my face and neck as I drove in dazed circles in the middle of town, road drunk and heat struck, cursing and unable to make a decision.

  ‘This is nothing,’ said a local. ‘This is not hot!’

  I watched thousands of swallows going down the orange-brown Orange River at dusk in a loose, vast stream. I tracked them as far as the binoculars could follow them. There were massive mid-river deltas of reeds down there; they could take their pick. I drove into the Kalahari as fast as possible with the windows down, just to see it and escape uncooked. Giving lifts to women and children I learned about seasonal farm work along the Orange: all was well now, harvest time, but in the winter their men just sat at home.

  Going north from Upington, where I gave the hire car back, you take the trans-Kalahari highway, which leads across half of Namibia, to Windhoek. A long, long night on an Intercape bus began perfectly, cruising at swallow height over the desert, past Snake Eagles on posts, towards a sunset behind a thunderstorm. At the height swallows fly, the world is a very different series of propositions, distinct from the way we understand it, composed and threaded in ways invisible to man. Villages are complete entities, towns are collections of districts, of kinds of roofs, a graph in which few structures intrude into the birds’ realm. The way the world joins up, the way the land undulates through its features and under our impositions, are all legible to a swallow. Everything that is not of the air moves at a fraction of their speed, except vehicles, but even these are more limited and predicable than we conceive them, stuck to the roads. From the height of a three-storey building weather becomes much more visible and comprehensible than it is from the land. Every foot they gain in height will add miles to their horizon line, and therefore to the range of their forecast. They would have seen the thunderstorm we were now approaching long before I had.