Common Ground

by Rob Cowen

  ‘They’re swifts, Libby,’ I said, ‘not sparrows.’

  She looked at me, frowned, and repeated the word to herself under her breath. Swifts. ‘And where do swifts come from?’

  ‘Africa.’

  Africa, she mouthed it silently again. ‘Why are they here then?’

  The words were there somewhere, but they suddenly refused to form in my mouth. I coughed and checked my phone. Only a minute had passed. Ridiculous. Then from somewhere beyond the end of the road, from the direction of the edge-land, that swelling sound again: Seeeeee-seeeee, seeeeee-seeeeee.

  ‘Here, look. They’re coming back,’ I said, pointing up at the long blue corridor above, formed by the rows of terraces. That’s the trick to watching them, to look at the sky rather than try to follow the bird. And that time we did see-see. Immediately three screamed into view and split formation, the two outer birds peeling left and right over roofs; the central swift plunging down into the canyon of houses, banking and brushing up against the side of number 28. It was a quick movement, a deliberate crash: the swift touching the point where wall met the carved wooden roof trim, before turning and bursting off again. It passed so close to us I could see the sun through its tail and hear the wing whistle. Libby put her hands up to her head and whooped. ‘It went through my hair!’ Not quite, but that’s how it feels when they explode past you – as though their seesaw wings are brushing your face, coating it with sky dust and cloud wool.

  It’s one of the things I love most about swifts – that they manage to pull off part elemental wonder and part town-bird with such aplomb; they are creatures with a truly panoptic world view, possessed of a higher consciousness tuned in to the great governing forces of our globe, and yet, for a short time, birds of the common people too. When they return to our realm it’s not to pristine reserves or protected wetlands, it’s here, to the sewage treatment plants, factories and back streets. The sprawl is as much part of the swift’s world as the stratosphere. They’re like little, wild, black boomerangs hurled down from the heavens, sent to us to bestow a kind of day-to-day benevolence. One minute you’re fumbling with the keys, emptying bins or waiting desperately for a phone call, the next they’re with you, above you, around you, a dose of the sublime where you least expect it; when you most need it.

  More came, spinning and thwacking into the eaves or bouncing off over our heads. Gangs of them casing out the joint – numbers 25, 20, 13, 12, all the houses soon had visitors. We ticked them off together each time the birds appeared in their scattering, lunatic, overlapping shrieks. I had no idea our street would be such prime real estate, but it made sense – a row of Victorian terraces that, for all its modern UPVC double-glazing and brightly painted front doors, is still decidedly higgledy-piggledy in places. Swifts have a nose for lapsed DIY duties: the fallen-away mortar between sandstone, the inviting vistas between slipped roof slates, the gaps where gable ends and eaves have warped a bit over the years. This is because, over time, swifts have warped a bit too. At some point along the evolutionary high wire they threw their lot in with us, largely abandoning the nesting habitats they evolved with, like tree holes and cliff fissures, for the nooks and crannies of towns. Some have suggested it may have coincided with when those master stonemasons, the Romans, were spreading through Europe. And that would have been a clever move. Beautifully opportunistic. Why wouldn’t you ally with an ever-expanding, building-obsessed species with a tendency to leave holes in its many roofs and towers? But what may have been a successful strategy for two thousand years has been unravelling in more recent decades. Swift numbers have been hit hard by post-war building methods and materials; the sealing up of structures in the name of energy efficiency, and a general squeamishness at sharing our homes with the natural world. They don’t give up easily, though. Being dependent on the man-made these days, swifts keep looking for the gaps, forgiving our cooling affections and indifference, blessing us with their presence. I love that about them too.

  That’s what all the wall-bouncing was about. It is known as ‘knocking’ or ‘banging’ and it’s what swifts do to scope out their nest sites or challenge for occupied spaces. The urgency was understandable. With mating delayed by the weather they were wasting no time with formalities, but slamming about, ringing doorbells one after another to see if anyone was home. Breeding swifts are traditionalists and will keep the same partner and nesting site year on year, provided man and nature are complicit. When arriving at their nest sites separately, the first bird in a mating pair will reclaim the spot by screaming their presence, folding in those broad wings and vanishing into the eaves. Should a rival already be inside they will fight in violent, close-quarter duels, like handcuffed wrestlers, hissing, grappling and scratching sometimes for hours at a time before one is ejected and the victor roosts to guard it and wait for their mate. Reunited, both male and female birds take shifts to gather nesting materials from the air – feathers, thistledown, leaves, grass, seed cases, even the cotton centre of cigarette filters – all taken on the wing and formed into loving, soft, cup-shaped bowls bound together by saliva. Spit-welded, you might say. The younger, non-breeding swifts – those birds under two or three years – also play the knocking game, usually receiving short shrift from a shrieking breeding occupant. Unperturbed, though, they pair up and range out to the edges of a colony, looking for space. In some instances they’ll even build dummy nests, practising for when their own time comes. Given their speed it’s hard to know for certain, but I’m pretty sure both breeding and non-breeding swifts were working their way down our road. It made me wonder if perhaps our street formed the outer limit of an established swift territory, if our house might not be a swift edge-land.

  My thoughts tumbled like this as we watched them, Libby and me. She was a little human blessing amid the avian ones. I was thankful she was there, forcing me to keep my eyes skywards, calming my trip-hammer heart, distracting me with her never-ending list of questions: ‘So how far is three million miles?’

  ‘Well … it’s like flying to the moon and back. Six times.’

  Her silent mouthing again. The moon and back. ‘And they can fly that far?’

  ‘Over a lifetime, yes.’

  ‘That’s impossible.’

  But nothing’s impossible. That’s what I was secretly telling myself. Swifts prove as much: the migrations, the heights, the distances, the speeds, the ability to navigate from African jungle to the same tiny crack beneath the same fascia board in Harrogate. Miracles happen in nature every day, we just don’t pay attention. Things disappear and things return. Cloudy mornings bring in sunny days. The world sometimes rights itself. Sensors pick up missing heartbeats.

  And a few miles away, the half-hour of surveillance came to an end. The nurse shook her head with bemusement and began removing the belt. ‘Nope, there’s nothing to worry about,’ she said. ‘The baby’s heart rate is perfectly normal. Strong and regular with just the usual variability. Spot on for twenty-eight weeks.’ She even showed Rosie the data printout – a perfect pattern of peaks and troughs. A mountainous, panoramic heartscape. Understandably, Rosie quizzed her: then why had it been fast? Why had it failed to register? Why these irregularities?

  ‘Hard to say. Could have been anything. I’ll have them look into it. My guess would be a problem with the equipment at the surgery. Either that or human error.’

  Then the baby kicked, hard, and, as though proving a point, it did so all evening, knocking and banging like the swifts outside our bedroom window.

  Three weeks later, and they have been among us every day since, revelling in hot, blue, powdery light as June slips unnoticed into this high, burning July. They have taken over the skies and are screaming the place down. Their shrieks whip and whistle past open windows, through curtains and office blinds drawn at midday to try to keep rooms cool. Everything being done is being done to that sound. Power saws moan through planks. Scaffolders sing tunelessly to radios. Cars speed up and slow down. Seeds disperse. Lorries cl
ang and grumble. Tractors spill new hay at traffic lights. People dress and eat and go to work and stumble home sweaty and tired. The bell of St John the Evangelist rings out over the edge-land. And above it all is a constant reminder of other rhythms at the margins of our lives. Even as I type these words I hear it through my attic window – seeeeee-seeeee, seeeeee-seeeeee – more females than males in that passing cluster, judging by their calls. It’s easy to tell. The females take the higher register in their maniacal, whirling, rusty-wheel duets.

  I see them all the time too. Occasionally, mid-sentence, I’ll stop typing and look up at the square of sky in my attic roof. A swift will be framed there for – what, a second? No, it has to be less than that – half a second. Faster than a blink. A slide accidentally double-clicked through a projector carousel. Sometimes the bird will be buoyed high up on a thermal, flapping madly, finding its balance before powering out of shot quick as a jump jet; other times one will be skimming only inches above the tiles. If I could pause time, I’d see more than just a blur rocketing past, I’d see a sleek, dark, chocolate-brown body, almost oiled, like an otter’s coat, and a tail that can either be forked and fish-like or folded into a tapering point. I’d see a faint creamy chinstrap and those kukri-shaped primaries: massive, blade-like, swept-back, a hindrance anywhere except in the air. I’d see an almost alien head perfectly adapted for open skies and, if I got closer still, an eccentric aviator’s face: large, black binocular-eyes, like a pair of flying goggles with their own in-built anti-glare eyebrows. I’d see a tiny, soft beak – a moustache really – above a mouth that becomes more basking shark than bird when hunting, gaping to inhale insects in phenomenal numbers. What I wouldn’t see, though, unless actually reaching through the glass and poking around its plumage, are legs. Swifts have the shortest stumps in the bird world, barely more than extensions of their bat-like, clinging feet, which retract completely when flying. Perfect for aerodynamics; useless for walking. Combined with those oversized wings, they mean that grounded swifts can struggle to get airborne again and, once fallen, will flop about, helplessly flailing for the air on the hard earth. People find them in this state sometimes, like a boat stuck on a sandbank, wings oaring away, the rower still going ten to the dozen.

  Many years ago concerned neighbours called on my mother to help remove an injured ‘something’ making a racket above their living room, shuffling, scratching and screaming. They were surprised to learn it was a swift, recently fledged, that had free-fallen straight from its nest into the recessed flat roof above their bay window. Up a ladder, Mum found it imprisoned by the raised sides of the leaded lip, like a spider in a bathtub. She picked it up, cupping gentle hands around those air-filled bones, then held it above her head on the flat of her palm, lifting and lowering it gently. After a while, perhaps understanding the upstroke of open air on its face, it fell off her fingers forward and flew, pumping its wings and shooting up to join a screaming throng careening around a chimney. I always used to envy Mum that memory of holding and releasing a swift. So much so, in fact, that I once longed to find one stranded on the floor, just so I could experience the paradox of weightlessness and power, those long wings between my fingers, the heart racing in my palm, that worldly eye fixed on mine.

  Not now, though. With my paternal instincts becoming keener each day, I just hope that the swifts have settled, mated and are incubating eggs. I thought I saw two coupling in mid-air above the ring road almost as soon as they had arrived on our street, but they were out of frame before my eyes had fully focused, lost behind the pitched roof of a betting shop. A good sign, though, is how annoyed the pigeons have become, how grumpy they seem about sharing their urban estates. On the opposite roofs they gather in clucky, sulky groups by the chimney stacks and gutters to mither: These out-of-towners, bloody immigrants, coming here and taking our houses … mumble, mumble. They were moaning so loudly the other day that I had to get up to close the window against their incessant cooing. As I did, I glimpsed a swift emerge from a crack just below them. It fell out, opened its seventeen-inch wingspan and masterfully looped-the-loop over the pigeons’ heads. They all jumped and screamed, scattering with much shaking of ruffled feathers. I nearly applauded; I’m not even sure the swift didn’t do it on purpose.

  After mating, female swifts will lay a clutch of two or three small, white eggs, which the pair takes turns to sit on for around twenty days. Incubation is, by all accounts, a picture of domestic bliss. Jobs are shared: while one sits on the eggs, the other goes out hunting, joining the marauding gangs of a colony’s non-breeding swifts racing in the streets and hunting insects. Unlike the younger birds, however, which climb ever skywards in the fading light to sleep in the open air, a breeding bird usually returns to its nest at nightfall and tucks up side by side with its mate. They announce this by screeching to one another – I’m here! I’m back! – late into the warm evenings, catching me unawares as I’m washing up with the window open or gathering clothes off the line in the backyard. Such gestures are wonderful, though. I find it heartening to hear their shrill homecomings.

  The shock of Rosie’s phone call that morning and the brief gravitational drag of loss it brought has taken its time to unknot from my insides. Although a false alarm, it was enough of a slippery footstep over a precipice for us both to pull each other back. A turning point. Slow down. Hole up. Nest. Rosie was overdue some holiday and she has taken it. Even though the glorious days continue, our time is spent home-bound, wrapped up with lists and chores, cleaning walls and carpets, finishing the decorating jobs I’d never got around to in January. And always sleeping early, side by side. The birthing books say the nesting instinct is a wholly natural stage; that, like birds, humans should ‘listen to the body’ and respond to our embedded biological imperatives. I think now that they may have a point. This morning as I waited for my coffee to brew, one hand resting on the cafetière plunger, Rosie surprised me, bouncing downstairs smiling, energy restored, eyes bright. She opened the newly cleaned doors to the yard, filling the kitchen with light and the screeching of swifts. ‘I feel like a different person today,’ she said. And standing there, washed by a beam of sun, I could see she was.

  We walk down Bilton Lane two hours before sunset. The sky is still treacle-thick with warmth, a smothering density of bronze and blue filled with pollen and the smell of bracken and traffic vapour. There’s no rush so we take the back roads, ducking under the low-hanging leaves of a lime sticky with aphid honeydew and thrumming with worker bees. Parked underneath, a van is sugar-coated, glazed like a doughnut and sprinkled with dust. I can’t resist touching its bonnet. I used to do the same as a kid just to feel the skin of my fingertips take to its tacky lacquer. As we approach the edge-land, I feel another pulling sensation, this one between my eyes. Magnetic. Over the roofs and lampposts, past the tanning salons, takeaways and dingy-windowed newsagents there is a pylon-stapled join where sky ripples down and meets the limits of town.

  These past weeks are the longest I have spent away from the edge-land and I can sense the change. I feel a pang of regret – jealousy, perhaps – that it hasn’t waited for me, that I’ve missed something. As the space between us narrows, this becomes mixed with other feelings, a sense of returning, of absorption, of acceptance. Homecoming. I bore Rosie by relentlessly pointing out details: Look at all these elderberry buds; I can’t believe the size of the butterbur leaves! But I can’t. And I can’t help saying it, either. There’s too much to take in. I have to let a little out. Along the old railway the infinite greens of the bushes, hedges and trees have reached their limits and lie draped and meshed, sweating out the heady incense of hot herbage. Between them poke the delicate pink spikes of willowherb and the white cloudy clusters of hogweed flowers, crawling with longhorn beetles. Wasps throb on burdock leaves. Further on, in the meadow, there is the honey smell of clover; its flowers are dotted purple-red or white among the seed-topped grass and splats of dusty plantain. Knapweed frills the edges of overgrown paths. Tufted vet
ch too. And common vetch. I see the shaving-brush seed heads of hawkweed oxtongue. Woundwort. Stinging nettle. Evening primrose. Speedwell. Dunnocks burble deep in the hedges, wrens trill. Fences and wires are covered by bindweed and bracken. Beneath them, the deep black pools of shade. On the far, running horizon, great swathes of hay meadow have been cut. Idling tractors are primary-coloured blobs in yellow stubble. The air is sweet dust and dandelion seeds and the hot metal of gleaming pylons. A toad plods splayed-toed across the path into a dry stack of grass. Crushed underfoot, pineapple weed scents our every step. The earth sings with crickets. I point and point and point. And look. And hear. And smell. And all the time, in my head, there’s a record playing, a particular phrase from Tubular Bells, Side 2, that runs from 4:21 to 5:21. This line selects itself sometimes on my internal iPod whenever view and atmosphere fall into place. There is something in the jarring 6/8 timing and the deep wistfulness of the piano part that sounds like the musical expression of joy and sadness combined. Its minor descent tumbles childlike across a landscape of guitar arpeggios that, at moments, echo exactly the chaotic, concurrent hums and squeaks that surround you as you walk here on a summer’s evening. That feeling of being fully in the moment and fully aware that the moment won’t last.

  Wandering up from the lane, we are in the raggedy fields running up to the holloway among wheat that is tall, parched and paper-cut sharp. Nearby there is a little cave in the hedge formed by the ribs of an arthritic elder where six months back I hid, alone and cold, and watched the fox hunting over frozen fields. A month ago I sheltered there from the deluging rain. Now a strip of evening light through the foliage is filled with gnats bouncing around like atoms. And red blackberries. A billion stems of grass. Mass molecular engagements are occurring between the air and my skin, the light and my eyes, sound waves and my auditory nerves. The edge-land is so powerfully alive and glowing that I need to take a breath and stop myself from becoming tearful. Right now I can sense something bigger in the curvature of the horizon, the birdsong, the unearthly crawling of insects and the immeasurable flowers. Something exquisite, enriching, frightening, indifferent, immortal. And I realise it doesn’t care whether I’m here or not.