The skies have quietened down over the past week. That’s not to say I still get ambushed by the sight of ten swifts whizzing above me, but these intense flavours, these screams and swerves, feel like they’re becoming increasingly sporadic. I’ve seen more pigeons and sparrows and blackbirds today than I’ve clocked swifts. And when I’ve managed to fix on one it’s far away, or seen-and-then-gone.
Currently, the best time of day to encounter the birds is morning. There are often three swifts flying almost languorously over our road between 7am and 9am. I take these to be the Bradley Street pair and our single parent swift. I’m going to nail my colours to the mast and say for the most part I think there is only one adult swift nesting in the eaves of our house. This ‘lone runner’ situation I believe mirrors last year’s dynamic (I debated this issue in my 2024 diary entries for some time). The main difference is that this year I think there are chicks in the roof space. When I’ve seen a swift enter the cleft under the guttering - on separate days - at 7.15am and 8.30am over the last week or so, I assume it’s because this swift is harvesting the sunup air to feed its brood.
It’s good to step out and look skywards, whatever I intuit or see (or don’t see). It gives me ten minutes to focus on something or nothing, to clear my mind. I’m not marking or doing admin or looking at a screen. These fast things allow me time to stop. There’s a poem by James Wright called ‘Lying in a Hammock at William Duffy’s Farm in Pine Island, Minnesota’ which is a meditation on doing nothing at all. Well, the narrator is active in terms of reflecting on what he sees and hears. He discovers a ‘bronze butterfly’ that’s ‘Blowing like a leaf in green shadow’. He hears ‘cowbells…[that] follow one another/Into the distances of the afternoon.’ Finally there is a ‘chicken hawk float[ing] over, looking for home.’ The short lyric ends on this statement: ‘I have wasted my life.’ I used to read this line as a sign that the narrator is berating himself for his own sizeable indolence. Now I think the narrator realises this is what he should have been doing all along: rather than chasing the money, he should have been lying in a hammock in the middle of nowhere, focusing on these ‘small’ details.
Time to focus on the small details. And if I don’t go looking for the swifts, particularly now, at the business end of things in July, I will miss them.
Here are some of the notes I’ve posted over the last week taken from 2021 (which I’ve highlighted in bold) and 2025, with a couple of added extras:
June 29th 2025
I wake to an open window and swifts, as fast as summer, calling the day in.
June 30th 2025
Iced lolly blue sky at 8am. The swifts do this trick where their wings are black and then they are brown, and when they tip them they appear chalk-white in flashes. Like they have dipped their feathers in dusty sunshine before they go and shake the light off again.
July 1st 2021
The swifts are feeding the chicks at 7am. They seem to do a lot of feeding early in the day. They approach from under the nest and hang in mid-air, filling the beaks that poke out through the brick, like the house itself was insatiable, like they are fuelling the house.
July 1st 2025
The swifts are busy over Bradley Street and, further up, over Crookes high street. Birds peel so low they swing beneath the street wiring by the junction with Mule House Road. I could jump up and almost feel the play of their wings.
July 2nd 2025
I listen in the bathroom to the roof space, to pick out their scratching or crying. Some years I hear them (intermittently, sparingly) but most of the time there is silence. Tonight, like most nights, you wouldn’t know they were there.
July 3rd 2025
Up at 7am I step outside. The air goes from silent to swift screams in an instant. Three birds follow each other in big loops over our road. I reckon these are the Bradley Street pair and our single parent swift. Our swift enters the nest at 7.15am to dish out what it has harvested from the sky.
July 4th 2025
The neighbour’s pond. Of course. It took me years to work out why swifts fly in low formation in the space between our garage and the neighbour’s side-wall. Today repeatedly they fly through shadows to skim above the round of ditchy-looking water, then veer off into sky.
July 5th 2025
A day when I almost catch swifts. Apart from these two birds that arc with large wings over the high street, every sighting is glimpsed or far off. When I depart for the pub at 9pm and it starts raining and I check the weather forecast app, I almost miss the swift as it hits the nest.
Thanks for reading this post. If you want to read my published work, including Little Piece Of Harm - which, like these swift diaries, is a kind of love letter to a city, you can find details on the Longbarrow Press website here. I also have a podcast where I interview poets about influence and poetics: The Two-Way Poetry Podcast. The two seasons of interviews are available on Podbean here.