by Rob Cowen
There must have been eighty, maybe a hundred, but so many that at first I took them not for birds but insects clouding in whirls over the drums, turning the way tea leaves do when washed down a plughole. I forgot the pain in my legs and stood there looking east, as the rising sun laid its hot hand across my forehead, transfixed by their flight and strange flocking, feeding formations. There was none of their usual velocity; the birds drifted in the air as if in slow motion, slow enough that I could make out each one’s profile: the stiff-winged, black anchor shape against the sky, reversing direction at will, taking what must have been millions of the stirred-up, snub-nosed sewage flies in balletic sweeps and dips. Here was the tidal wave of summer in its infancy, still out at sea, gathering strength. My boat had somehow drifted into its path. After a while, standing there staring seemed voyeuristic, as though I’d caught them early, backstage, doing warm-ups before the full show. I felt that I should say something, maybe cough politely, let them know I was there at least. But what do you say to birds?
Alarms, security guards, police sirens – they’re what you might expect when you break into a sewage works, not a sky full of swifts. Such things lift the lead from your head. Worth crossing a sea of nettles for; twice, as it turned out.
Where they went next, though, I couldn’t tell you. Those last warm days of May broke, and in swept the storm-horses of rain and wind, catching the country out in a stampede, kicking down the flowery frills and thick green bunting with heavy, iron shoes. The light changed. Skies slated. The outside intruded. Slugs invaded the kitchen every night, leaving silvery ghostly ribbons all over the floor. Weather bulletins showed a graphic of an atmospheric depression migrating east across the Atlantic, settling over the British Isles. Its isobars corkscrewed in a lazy circle, a scribbling motion round and round, like a bored child’s crayon. ‘Here for the next month,’ the man said. And it was, all day, every day, from dawn to dusk until the Nidd surged high, loud and dirty brown. The woods and the wheat fields shook and cowered like slaves under an overseer’s whip. I thought of the swifts often, but each time I donned a cagoule and ran down to the sewage works, seeing anything was impossible, like the sky had fallen in and lay bubbling on the earth. Everything was rank with a sulphurous fog. Eventually I stopped bothering. I knew they weren’t there. Flies spasmed in soaking cobwebs between the perimeter’s barbed wire; I could hear the mechanical arms turning and whining. The egg stink. That was all.
Swifts can’t feed in rain and so will travel astonishing distances to avoid bad weather and find food. They are fantastic meteorologists, capable of detecting the finest fluctuations in air pressure and moisture. Then, despite only weighing the same as a bar of Dairy Milk, they will fly into a headwind to reach more clement climes on the fringes of weather patterns. I reasoned this was what my swifts had done. But exactly where they had gone was anyone’s guess. Ornithological surveys have tracked swifts leaving gathering points above London to conduct foraging trips over the Norfolk and Lincolnshire coasts, way out across the North Sea, even as far as Germany, to plunder the abundant clouds of insects that swarm at the rear of an occluded front.
To grounded minds, feeding excursions that might clock up 600 or more miles in a day seem incomprehensible, inefficient even, but the more you learn about this bird, the more you realise that considering any part of its existence by our limits and measures is a mistake. Swifts are almost entirely beings of the air, as near to an element as you’ll find in a creature, evolved to spend their lives in a state of permanent airborne motion. From the point that they fledge and free-fall from nests on those sickle wings, the swift’s life is one long aerial journey. Unless injured, they will never touch the ground. They feed, drink, preen, mate, even sleep in the air. Only fleetingly when nesting high up in the nooks and crannies of old buildings do they become creatures of the lower realms, of our earthly world.
Just as the storms had sent the swifts soaring, the dreary, pelting days drove me inside. Each morning through a curtain of grey I waved off Rosie as she set out on her own swift-like excursions across the county. Since moving north she’d taken a job selling produce into delis and farm shops, which necessitated considerable road miles. Her ‘territory of responsibility’ stretched as far as Lincolnshire in the south and Whitley Bay in the north and took in pretty much every back road in-between. Working long hours at my desk as rain machine-gunned the roof tiles above, I worried about her out there, driving alone under dark, unrelenting skies. Soon flood bulletins began to pour in by the hour. The ground was saturated. Reporters dressed in that uncomfortable mix of waterproofs and ties described how whole towns were being cut off or split in half by bursting rivers. There was talk of climate change and blame, how all of us need to get used to living with these kinds of extreme meteorological outbursts from now on, as if the weather was some moody teenager tantruming through a house. The actual source of the misery took many forms depending on who you listened to: either it was Arctic sea ice knocking the jet stream off course, pushing it south, or it was our overheating atmosphere creating drier air capable of holding more moisture, hence the heavier, increased rains. Whatever the scientific argument being put forward, all seemed to have one depressing area of common ground: the hand of man.
Every day Rosie said the same: ‘I’m fine,’ but I could see she was exhausted. By the end of the month, she was done-in by the hypnotic motion of the windscreen wipers and the effort of concentrating through clouds of road spray as she followed diversions. One night she fell into a deep sleep almost as soon as she walked through the door. Lying on our bed as the rain squalled against the window, she gently held her bump, our baby, in its own little watery world. I stretched out next to her, slipped an arm under her shoulder and stared up at the ceiling. It was 23 June. The longest day of the year had already passed, unmarked, lost in the flood; the warmth and sun it normally promised seemed further away than ever. I thought about the swifts again, birds that were supposed to be the winged heralds of our high summer and blazing days, and wondered, Had they come too early? Had they bailed on us? Do swifts make mistakes? I wasn’t sure, but something was troubling me. Their absence, like the unceasing rain, made me anxious, as though the world wasn’t working properly. ‘Generally unsettled,’ the forecasters might have said.
You’ll read of the common swift (Apus apus) as a ‘British bird’, but this is something of a misnomer – a bit like saying the passing clouds are British, or the constellations. It’s true that many make the nearest thing to a home – their nests – here, but even the swifts that converge in our skies each year only spend a maximum of three months (usually between May and August) in the UK, a mere quarter of their lives. Really, we borrow them at best. The rest of the time they are in transit or hoovering up insects above the rainforests and rivers of the Democratic Republic of Congo. All the world’s population of common swifts overwinters there, living the same fluid, ranging life under African skies. Just as they will in more northerly latitudes, swifts cover huge areas in the search for food. Flying high and fast they will travel as far as Mozambique in the east, Angola in the west, and down to South Africa. Then, around April, with their breeding season approaching, they surge back in their millions, rising and heading pole-wards, undertaking epic and perilous migrations over vast oceans, mountains and deserts to often long-established nesting sites across Europe and Western and Central Asia.
‘Our’ swifts, as much as we can ever really call them that, were once believed to fly directly north, following what seems the straightest and shortest possible route back to Britain. That’s what land-locked logic assumed. However, recent geo-location data from the British Trust for Ornithology has revealed another story. One tagged bird’s ‘flyway’ – as the experts snazzily term migration routes – was found to follow the Congo river west, heading out from its mouth across the Atlantic before turning up in a curve to Liberia in west Africa, taking advantage of feeding sites and wind patterns. There it circled for ten days, feasting and fa
ttening on swarms of flying termites, before a rapid, non-stop flit back to Cambridgeshire across the Sahara, over Spain and France, covering 3,100 miles in just five days. Amazingly, within three months, just as autumn began to cool the far horizon, it made a similar-length journey in reverse. In total, the bird was recorded as flying a round trip of 12,400 miles to breed in the UK. And this was by no means the record – other tagged swifts in the same migratory loop had more than 17,000 miles under their wings.
And to think that these birds make these pilgrimages once a year, every year, cruising at seventy miles per hour as loftily as 10,000 feet, sometimes higher. People claim to have seen them at nearly double that altitude, cruising above the peaks of the snow-crusted Himalayas. That zooms out the mind instantly. Right out and up into the cold clarity of the higher, quieter realms. You enter a kind of Google Earth world where cities are reduced to smudges of grey; forests and field networks are little more than pixels of green. The more you think of it, the more the head spins, as though you’re flying up there yourself amid the isotherms and the jet stream, rising with air currents as sun-edged horizons, entire countries and vast, grey, hostile seas spin and vanish between the breaks in clouds below. It’s a dizzying perspective. The mind struggles to conceive of how these small, almost weightless sylphs, woven of little more than feather and thin bone, are capable of such ludicrous speeds, heights and distances. And they are nothing short of ludicrous. I read somewhere once that a swift chick ringed in Switzerland was found dead as it returned to the same nest site twenty-one years later. Observers reckoned that in the intervening years it had clocked up around three million miles.
But for birds migration is not a choice, an urge to travel like ours, born of being too long settled; it is an ancient, hard-wired instinct driven by those two biological imperatives: survival and reproduction. To the swift a British summer is supposed to provide the riches of insect hatches filling warm air and a relatively calm climate for raising chicks. If swifts had such things, the travel brochure for the UK would promise: ‘long balmy days and sunny evenings for extended feeding sorties – perfect when there are new mouths to feed!’ So what happens when they arrive to a washout? Are those ancient, miraculous journeys all in vain? Almost certainly. Experts tell us that adult swifts toiling in the wet end up woefully underweight and at risk of lacking the reserves to complete the return flight to Africa. Even when they try to nest, scratching the undeniable biological itch, it seems they have an awareness of the hopelessness of it all. Knowing there isn’t enough food to feed themselves, let alone young mouths, they abort, pushing eggs unhatched from nests. Over time and given persistently grim summers, it’s feasible that swifts could cease to exist at all in our skies. We’re only too aware nowadays that species will vanish, but the thought of losing swifts terrifies me. ‘They’ve made it again,’ wrote Ted Hughes, ‘which means the globe’s still working.’1 How perfect that is. Nothing speaks of this planet’s interconnectedness like the swifts’ migration; nothing screams so loudly of its fragility either.
The room had grown dark. Tiredness was finally dragging down my somersaulting mind. My head sank back, further into the pillow, descending into the quiet, loamy blackness of sleep. Then it registered something, an alteration occurring in the atmosphere. The rain was stopping. I looked up at the ceiling and imagined the roof peeling away, the clouds dissipating and seeing swifts up there somewhere, swimming broad-shouldered among the stars.
My arm had gone to sleep. I slid it from under Rosie’s shoulder. ‘You OK?’ she whispered, stirring. ‘What are you thinking about?’
‘Migration.’
She smiled and turned over. ‘Please don’t,’ she said, guiding my hand to her belly and holding it there. ‘Stay here with us.’
I laughed and then it dawned on me. That was it! That was what I wanted to say to the swifts, what I should have said when our paths crossed at the sewage works. Stay here with us. And it was those words I was thinking of the next morning when, opening the curtains, I glanced up and finally saw a scattered band of them flying high in blue sky, east to west, like stray eyelashes blown across coloured paper. I pressed my face against the glass and then wanted to tell Rosie, but she had rushed out an hour earlier to a midwife appointment almost forgotten in the mad monsoons of the last month. Oh, well. A nice surprise for later. Then – what timing – she called. I was on the edge of relaying the news when my brain registered the formality of her tone, the forced calm, the words: I’m on my way to the hospital. There is … there might be … something wrong.
Hope is such a useless emotion, but it’s the default setting in all of us. You can’t help resorting to it. And I hoped against hope that this was just normal pregnancy gremlins, a regular nothing, some common mix-up. After all, she’d corrected herself; she’d said might, hadn’t she? With the phone still clasped to my ear, brain whirring, I realised I’d been staring at the silicon seal that wraps around our double-glazing for I don’t know how long, noticing for the first time how it had a few little black specks of mould spreading from the corner. I noticed other things too. The heat and brightness of the morning. The softness of the carpet between my toes. The carpet – we’d deliberated in the shop and then plumped for the softest and most stain-resistant one, even though it cost more, as we both envisaged little hands and feet crawling over it. All the time, in my mind, cogs were turning, processing. To speed things up, Rosie was driving herself straight from the doctors’ surgery and was already near the hospital when she’d called. Don’t come, she’d said. Honestly. By the time you get here they will have finished the scan. The scan? How long does that take? They put me on a machine for twenty minutes. I’ll call as soon as I can. Promise. Don’t come.
The machine is actually a belt consisting of two sensors which is strapped over the womb to monitor the baby’s heartbeat. As I washed quickly, dressed and tightened the belt of my jeans, I thought of the same thing happening a few miles down the road and felt sick. I sat down. Over and over a question: How can I fix this? I got up again. Making coffee I knew I wasn’t going to touch, I replayed internally what Rosie had told me, looking for solutions: the midwife had been going through the routines as normal, asking the questions, all cheery, motherly, brassy, comforting. ‘So, what about this rain we’ve been having?’ Her eyes had taken on a glazed, middle-distance look as she ‘had a feel’ around Rosie’s bump and took her blood pressure – quite high. ‘Have you been overdoing it? You should be taking it easy at this stage.’ Then she drew closer, leaning forward with the stethoscope. The cold disc caught a high, tripping heartbeat first, going far too fast for itself. Odd. So she reset and tried again. And again. Now it was even more unusual, a yawning silence. An absence. It was then she called the Antenatal Clinic.
Every room in our house suddenly seemed devoid of air. I went outside and – wouldn’t you just know it? – the day was spectacular. The month had got over its tantrum. Light poured down the street. The mottled stone chimney stacks reached up into a tropical ocean sky, casting long shadows over the slates. You could smell the heat building. Cars gleamed. In front of our door, before the low stone wall and the pavement, weeds had run riot with recent over-watering and colonised a small strip of pebbles completely: pink-flowered herb Robert, willowherb, dandelion, alkanet, the rough leaves of a flowering currant dug up long before our time, yet still clinging on. A laurel bush I’d cut back a few weeks earlier had started re-growing clumps of soft, waxy leaves from its cut branches. I noticed all this: the way nature was defying the obstacles, using them even, the way the laurel had tangled with the fence to gain better traction and strength, the way the currant had forested the pebbles with young shoots. I noticed it all. And hoped. Could these be signs? I thought about running to the edge-land, running to the hospital. Then, suddenly woozy, I crouched down with my back against the house. An orb spider’s web was knitted perfectly between the laurel’s leaves. I fought the urge to project everything onto that spider, but my brain wasn’t
behaving – If it moves left everything will be OK. Move left. Please. I checked my phone’s screen, bewildered by how slowly the minutes were passing. The spider sat still. The stone in my stomach grew heavier. And over and over, those four words in my head: Stay here with us.
The sound was distant at first, like that note you hear sometimes when still half-asleep with your head buried in a pillow and you breathe out through your nose. A soft, airy whistle. Then it swelled quickly until it was a loud banshee scream – seeeeee-seeeee, seeeeee-seeeeee – zipping fast and low over the terraces and the back-to-backs. Swifts tipped into the streets in riots of joy and noise, like a carnival hitting town. Their scream wasn’t menacing or melancholy, more playful than anything; the peak of a laughing fit, a toddler being tickled. Seeeeee-seeeee, seeeeee-seeeeee, they implored in their glee. And I tried, but before I could even turn my head they were off again, arrowing over another roof.
‘Did you see the sparrows? They’ve gone mad!’ said the little girl from next door. I hadn’t noticed her coming up the pavement but she stood on the other side of our fence now, foot on her scooter, all red dress and big smiles. She’s a kind, confident girl, Libby. Could be a kid’s cartoon heroine – a wonderfully bolshie tomboy, bright as sun on snow and the first person who spoke to me on our road after we moved in. Shielding her eyes with a hand on her thick-rimmed glasses, she craned her neck and scanned the empty sky.