The Swift (Apus Apus)
Yesterday the swifts appeared overhead to celebrate St George’s day. It’s only the second time in eighteen years that I have seen them over our garden on Ladies Mile and it’s an intoxicating sight. They really should be whooping with joy as they wheel and dive at impossible angles, genuinely surfing the airways!
It not surprising that they were once thought not to have legs at all as they are very tiny and they are much happier in the air than on the ground where they can barely walk. This explains their Latin name which means footless. In heraldry the Swift is associated with fourth sons who literally had no land to put a foot on.
They are sometimes confused with swallows but are darker, have shorter tails and don’t congregate on telephone wires. In fact, they are actually closely related to humming birds which is not so surprising given that they spend most of their time in far warmer climes; just visiting us to breed before leaving again in July or August to make the arduous journey south again to Africa.
They were once thought to hibernate in mud and it was Edward Jenner (who also invented inoculation) that first discovered that they migrated. This mysterious lifestyle led them to be thought of as the devil’s bird in medieval times, apparently their cries were the screams of souls being dragged down to hell! More prosaically their nests are the main ingredient of Birds Nest soup.
These joyful little signs of Spring are seriously endangered, possibly due to changes in roof building. If you are lucky enough to have swifts nesting under the eaves you can report it to the RSPB and help them build up a picture of their distribution and support their preservation.
Extract from ‘Swifts’ by Ted Hughes
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 —
And here they are, here they are again
Erupting across yard stones
Shrapnel-scatter terror. Frog-gapers,
Speedway goggles, international mobsters —
A bolas of three or four wire screams
Jockeying across each other On their switchback wheel of death
Wild Groombridge 