It’s that summer of the evening (as a guy once sang), when I look up and see two or three desultory swifts swinging over the roofs. For a second I am distracted and when I glance skywards again there’s a dozen or more swifts allofasudden spiralling in the blue. The birds don’t convene for long - they are parting as soon as they are gathering - but it’s a rich and propitious moment.
Last June felt cold and wet. I can see from numerous diary entries how I am fretting about the detrimental effects of the weather on our sparse swift population. See my post for June 10th (2024). It shows my optimism is wearing thin: I’ve hardly seen two birds entering the nest, let alone think a pair might be raising a brood before the end of summer. One theory I played around with was the second swift I saw was having a fling with our resident bird. It does happen apparently. Once I saw a bird leave the nest at 10pm - and it didn’t return: I thought its bed lay somewhere else.
It was also about this time last year that I went with William to the University of Glasgow. I remember walking up to the Necropolis not far from St Mungo’s Cathedral and looking up, checking the sky out for swifts. I kept looking up through our visit, particularly around the West End, but didn’t catch sight of any fast-moving screechers. The RSPB Swift Mapper shows there are a few nests in the city, but nothing like Sheffield’s catch. Exploring a little further afield, it seems that Edinburgh and the east coast of Scotland has a far larger population of the birds.
Scotland’s east coast is of interest to me in this regard because one of the poets I keep returning to writes about this patch (particularly around the Tay) with great clarity and sensitivity. Kathleen Jamie spends a lot of her writing life looking up. I would surmise the subject she has returned to most over the past twenty years - both in her creative nonfiction and poetry - is birds (her last published collection of poems is entitled The Keelie Hawk). She keeps circling round to swifts. Here’s one of the earliest appearance of the creature in a poem from The Queen of Sheba (1994):
Swallows and Swifts
Twitter of swallows and swifts:
’tickets and visas, visas and tickets’ —
winter, and cold rain
clears the milky-way of birdshit
where wires cross the lane.
It’s interesting that Jamie never draws together these two ‘families’ in the same poem again. The two birds have very different taxonomies, after all. And really, this poem is focused one bird rather than other: the guano ‘miky-way/…where wires cross the lane’ is the action or habit of swallows. But what she does do, in a much more sophisticated fashion, is give voice to the birds in the later poem ‘Swifts’:
Deserts, moonlit oceans, heat
climbing from a thousand coastal cities
are as nothing now,
say our terse screams.
The cave-dark we were born in
calls us back.
This poem could have the alternative title ‘Genesis’ perhaps: it feels like an origin story. Swifts are both birds of her ‘locale’ and they have a transcendental quality to them. I like how she lets them speak for themselves.
In a more recent prose poem (from her 2024 collection Cairn) the focus flips between the swifts (‘a dozen or so, turning above the rooftops’) and the sky (‘grey cloudlets against a greyish gold against an otherworldly porcelain blue’) since one is so interconnected with the other - sky and swift balance out each other, draw on each other. To show this synthesis, Jamie brings the two ‘elements’ together at the end of the piece: ‘The swifts still high, stealing the last drops of day.’
In 2021 the story of the swifts on our road was looking up too. It’s almost like the words on the page are filled with space and sunlight in the diary entries from June onward. The language relaxes into a new rhythm of thought and feeling. I’m hoping for brighter things.
Here are some of the notes I’ve posted over the last week taken from 2021, 2024 and 2025, with some added extras:
June 8th 2021
This morning I wake early, 6am - to see a whole bunch of swifts gathered in the skies above Crookes - to the south of the house - more than I’ve seen all year - an early morning get-together before the birds fly off - if they fly off at all - to where? There must be at least ten of them, some just above the roofs, some spiralling higher - some swerve close to our window in one long curving arc. They screech.
The swifts look bigger than they have done in previous years - bigger in the sky, bigger in the blue. More lithe and muscular - their wings like supple blades. Midday and the they are above our garden swerving air.
June 8th 2024
Talking to William about the swifts. He was saying how he was enjoying their screeching: everything about them is elegant except their calls, their noise.
June 8th 2025
This evening three desultory swifts as clouds build for more rain. Then they climb and, all off a sudden, there’s energy with… seven, eight, nine swifts criss-crossing each other. They tangle and pull apart, leaving three swifts to glide over our street. Then at 9:19pm a swift dives into ‘land’, almost clipping the neighbour’s tree as it veers in.
June 9th 2021
We notice how one of our swifts goes into the nest earlier than other swifts in the group - at about 9:45pm (the same time as last night). When ensconced in the nest you know it’s there because when other birds fly over the roof and screech, the swift replies from the hole in the brickwork - screeching back.
June 9th 2025
Out in the evening to watch swifts beating the bounds before the heavy rain. Two swift go from high to low and follow each other into the nest. I have never seen this kind of entry before, one tucking in straight after the other. Our swifts this year are cut from a different cloth.
June 10th 2021
Tonight a swift comes in at 9:50pm. A blink-and-you-miss-it moment.
June 10th 2024
My instinct is that our swifts have gone. The quiet skies, particularly later in the day, suggest our pair have disappeared. I see one swift on and off - I think from the Bradley Street nest (it’s odd to see a swift alone). Sometime between the brief heat of early June and now, our swifts had made a decision(?) to leave. Without eggs to nurture and intermittent-to-heavy rain falling for most of the week they have had no reason to stay here. They could find somewhere more hospitable (and warmer) and wouldn’t need to rest/sleep in the cold. They might come back if the weather improves but I’m not holding my breath.
June 10th 2025
A white contrail splits the blue sky in half. The swifts - for most of June so far - have vanished during the day.
This evening thin, white, whipped clouds capture the light. The good weather pulls swifts higher and higher. They are still out there when I go inside at 9:40pm.
June 11th 2024
Driving over to Barnsley with Bob, we slowly follow the Don by Meadowhall and swifts are at work over the river; hard and sharp between the dragging cars.
June 11th 2025
Sitting outside from 6:30pm, the swifts arrive early from wherever they have been. They convene at times as a ‘crowd’ - sometimes ten together, then split apart and roam the neighbourhood in twos and threes. High and low. Midsummer leisure.
June 12th 2025
Walking down to work I hear the briefest snatch of swift cries over Crookesmoor, like a radio tuning in then out again.
Tonight I play the swift calls and is it two swifts sing back to me from the nest?
June 13th 2021
The worry is you wait for the swift to roost but it doesn’t turn up - that at 9:50pm or whenever no bird returns - what happens then? But they always do return. Tonight nearing 10pm a swift flies down the middle of our street then turns up and loops like the flourish of a penned signature and enters the nest.
June 13th 2025
Tonight when a bird comes in — once in a practice loop, the next the approach into the nest — it comes in so low I can hear its whoosh through the air, the air carving off its wings.
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.
Thanks to Jo Veal for the artwork on this post. There will be more on Jo and her swift art in a later correspondence.