Every summer in early May, bird-minded Brits start looking for the swifts. The birds come screaming up from Africa and southern Europe like arrows, filling the sky with a fantasy of speed. They’re here for just a few months to return to their mates and their nests and breed, the only time of year their little stubby feet will touch down. Their nests are high up—once on cliffs, now more likely in the eaves of buildings—so they can drop easily down into the air on their foraging trips for drifting nest-makings and insects and spiderlings.
For someone from the western U.S., Europe’s common swifts (Apus apus) are a treat. Before, I had only seen one other species of swift, the white-throated, a few times, slicing high around a remote cliff face—nothing like the daily sightings of acrobatic squadrons in the sky above my house in Cambridge. Learning about their yearly sojourns and heroic feats of continuous flying endeared them to me even more. And the David Attenborough Building swift nest boxes clinched the deal.
The British rightfully treasure their summer share of the swifts, and are painfully aware that it’s slipping away from them. Although the common swift is doing relatively all right globally, breeding numbers in the UK have plummeted. This has been diagnosed partly as a nest problem: old buildings with the requisite nooks and crannies are being replaced with nest-proof ones. So there are scores of swift conservation groups advocating for institutions and everyday citizens to help save the UK swifts by installing nest boxes on their upper stories. That includes Cambridge, and the David Attenborough Building (DAB), campus of the Cambridge Conservation Initiative.
I first heard about swift nest boxes by way of explanation of the looping screams playing outside the window of the tower office in the DAB, where I have a desk. The local swift advocates had recently installed a dozen or so nest boxes on the tower and were attracting the gregarious birds with calls (to the consternation of some of my office mates). Although no swifts nested in the boxes that year, this saga inspired my first swift poem (later published in Bristlecone Firesides).
Swifts
On top of the David Attenborough Building
there is a colony of disembodied swifts
screeing in shrill digital loops a conservationist’s
best guess at a translation for
We’re here
There’s a place for you
Come join us.
Last Cambridge summer, the ruse failed.
No flesh-and-feather swifts
found these city-centre nesting boxes
despite looming need for high-tower refuge
against the bite of decline
into code amber alarm.
They were one tower less
in the loss of lofty crags and holes
for hatching soft new swifts.
~
Working our daily tasks
at computers behind the tower windows
where the whirring screeches play,
we hear only frequency and pitch
perhaps designed to fray human nerves.
We mutter,
Bloody swifts.
Though we too are conservationists,
we have papers to write, PhDs to complete.
We ask them to diverge swift hours
from working hours. They do,
but turn up the crepuscular cries, saying,
We hope they hear.
~
Tonight, in the evening shadow of the
David Attenborough Building,
I hear swerving screams above me and I know
from the pound of my veins
that this is no meaningless recorded keening,
but fierce aerial speech veiled
in scaly head, forked tail,
trilling throat, tremulous scythes,
sunset flare and liquid air
transposed to blitzkrieg feathers.
They are saying,
We’re here.
I am saying,
Join us.
Two summers of hoping later, one of the boxes with a live feed camera installed hosted its first successful breeding pair. This summer, the pair returned. As I’m in the final months of writing my PhD thesis, I have special need for distraction, so I kept careful watch on the live feed and followed the chicks’ development like a soap opera (not that I watch actual soap operas). Just this last week, the two chicks fledged.
I took some notes, some screenshots of the live feed, and hatched another poem for this year’s swifts. Read on…
27 May
The swift couple have moved in and are broody, preening and poking each other with their little flint beaks almost constantly during wakeful times. What changes happen in their blood when they land, when they swap continuous sky for narrow feathered space filled with their mate and their folded self? Is it blissful relief, cozy affection, barely contained restlessness, or just a different season?
16 June
Chicks are first spotted in the nest after several weeks of brooding (we never did see the eggs), tiny alien pink heads with bulbous sealed purple eyes, waving up among the nest feathers for a feed.
21 June
They’ve already quadrupled (?) in size, with scaly beginnings of pin feathers. Their pale, wet triangular gapes are all-consuming whenever a parent arrives. They’re not spared the creepy horizontal scuttling of the too-big parasitic louse fly between the feathers like a magic show. (It’s showed up in my dreams at least once.) Apparently it’s not too much of a threat to them.
23 June
I noticed a round white blob of feces fly out of a back end over the edge of the nest, and learned online that baby birds produce “fecal sacs” as a containment method (ie built-in “diaper”), which the parents may either cart away or eat. I then witnessed the second method. Gulp.
28 June
I first noticed the dark eye-patches peep open to reveal a little black eye. They still mostly keep them shut in their scaly pink faces.
5 July
The swift chicks are well into the hard work of growing their feathers. Their head/face feathers have grown in nicely so they’re much handsomer now, even though when they tuck their bills to preen their still-pin-feathered chests they reveal their scrawny cricked necks below where the fine crown feathers stop. Their back feathers are still floofed with down, but their wing and tail feathers have nice scalloped edges and splay out nearly full-fan when they stretch, and when folded, add to their parents’ thicket of curving points in the nest. They still attack their parent’s heads and necks with their gape, but with eyes fully seeing. They’ve gotten increasingly restless, nearly teetering over the edge of the nest-form into the box-at-large, but not quite. One of them seems more intent on this exploration than the other–maybe it’s slightly older?
7 July
I noticed some of the swift experts climbing up the ladder to the roof space above my office door, and a few minutes later I checked to see the live feed camera covered up. I scrolled back and watched the chicks cower as the back of the nest box lifted, letting in a blare of light, and a giant hand came in to scoop them up. A little while later they were back in the nest but not in sight; as soon as they were released one of them shrank down on the other side of the nest form and one of them scrambled frenetically up on top of the live feed camera. The parents came back an hour or so later and it took quite a bit of coaxing for the chick to come down (I was worried the camera would get dislodged, but after a bit of wobbling it was fine).
I went to chat with the experts as they came back down the ladder. This earth-shattering experience had been for the sake of weighing and “ringing” the chicks—that is, putting numbered bands around their legs so that they could be tracked later. (They also found a second healthy nest of chicks in a box without a camera.) At that age, they told me, the chicks and parents can handle a little disruption. And within a few days, the chicks were moving confidently around the box, the edge-of-nest barrier broken and the ordeal seemingly forgotten.
From then on, though still a little pin-feathery, the chicks spent more and more time looking out the nest box entrance and exercising their wings. I’ll let my poem tell it.
Swifts, July
Their lives are a miracle
of propulsion and lift.
The whole mysterious sky is theirs,
but folded into nest-box
is another mystery:
the magnetic draw of brood
the slowing of blood
the quickening of egg
the frail pink bodies
that will tick inexorably,
featherwise, toward sky.
But first they must feed.
They must grow into
their bulbous sealed eyes
their scaled pinfeathers
their pale wet gapes,
flint-tipped triangles of want
trawling destiny.
Squinting, they begin to learn
light, until they blink
as luminously as their parents,
obsidian-glint in fierce alcoves
where brow feathers settle.
Wings stretch full fan, crossing
in the thicket of curving points
come evening
when the whole family sleeps.
They brave the teetering edge
of nest-haven. While feathers fill in,
they sit by nest-hole and look out,
considering their inheritance:
space, boundless, streaked
with screaming speed.
This is decreed,
the sitting and looking,
by the same force that lengthens
their feathers, sends them flapping
and stretching, testing wings
against narrow nest-walls—
the quickening.
When they go,
dropping suddenly into light,
they won’t land
until the brood-call
pulls them in again.
A year, two, three
over Africa and ocean,
then nest, then sky again:
the universe
and its soft crowded core.
Their blood knows.
They are almost ready.
23 July
A week or so after I wrote the poem, I checked the live feed and saw there was only one chick left in the next. The more intrepid chick had unceremoniously launched away, leaving its sibling to ponder the sky alone for a few more days, comforted occasionally and still cuddled at night by its parents. Then it too, was gone, joining other fledglings for their first journey south.
A parent returned with a bulging crop to an empty nest and turned several circles in it. I couldn’t help but wonder if it felt anything akin to human parental feelings of bittersweet—or perhaps relief.
The couple spent a few more nights sleeping snuggled together in their box. Then—yesterday, or the day before—they were off to Africa. They’ll be back.
