Swift Diaries
Holding Patterns
I’ve been leaning a little bit more on the 2025 diary this week. This is due in part to there being a big holiday-shaped hole in my account from 2024. As a family, we’ve been making the trek (and I use the word trek advisedly) from Sheffield to the Isles of Scilly, on and off, for the last twenty years. St Agnes, our island of choice, offers a very different avian experience - well, a very different life experience to the swifts and cars and coffee shops and bakeries of Crookes. As for 2021s daily offerings, I had given up reporting back to myself by mid-May since swift movements were so patchy over our neighbourhood, and I hadn’t tagged a bird by then entering under our eaves.
I felt so low, believing I had in some way failed - and not only that - let down everyone who cared about the sanctity and survival of swifts. Charles Foster writes well about the emotional yaw of waiting for swifts in The Screaming Sky (which is a kind of diary of a year in the life of swifts). In the chapter ‘May’ he makes a false positive out of Oxford’s ‘silent skies’: ‘I won’t need to look shamefacedly up when they’re screaming down between the terraced houses, knowing that it would be far better to scream around a village somewhere above Lucca.’ He projects his own inadequacies as an ‘accidental’ guardian (his house too has a swift nest) onto Oxford ‘where it’s cold and dank and smells stale.’ Yes, it’s better that they don’t arrive: ‘And best of all, I’ll be spared the desolation of their departure…’
Reading Foster’s own experiences, many of which I can relate to, underlines to me how much I think of swifts as urban creatures. Perhaps swifts do circle over Wingletang Down and Horse Point but I’m just not looking! The largest flocks of swifts I’ve ever come across have been in Italian cities: in Rome one Easter; in Turin as the days slipped into September. When my son visited Thailand in March 2024, he sent me a sketchy video of swifts (‘loads of swifts’) spiralling above a glowing Seven Eleven sign and the pinkish skyscrapers of Bangkok at dusk (this was probably the Pacific swift he was recording). But Foster had no need to worry - the swifts returned to Oxford in May of the year he was writing his book. And look, we didn’t even have to wait until May this year to see our first scimitar-winged bird flickering in the sky.
But in 2021 I couldn’t see the pattern emerging, the holding pattern that I had intuited from previous years of watching and second guessing the birds. By pattern I mean an order of things. So sometime in early May, if the world is good - if it’s warm enough and the wind is generally blowing in the right direction, a few swifts will arrive over our neighbourhood (I think they’re usually passing through but I don’t know this.) Then more swifts will appear - these (I hope) will stick around until mid-August. One swift - and usually it is only one - from amongst this group that has returned from the other side of the world, will inhabit the space above our bathroom’s false ceiling. If it’s going to be a good year the partner will turn up mid-May, well certainly before the month is out. If I go out of an evening just before dusk I will see one and then two birds hitting the crack in the brickwork and disappearing. If there are eggs in the nest the pattern will change again. We’re heading into late May/June now. At dusk, only one bird will enter the nest since the other swift is warming the batch. This then leads to a midsummer variation, where the bird who has been sitting on the eggs leaves the nest at about 9:45pm-10pm, careens around for fifteen minutes or so and returns to the house in near darkness.
In 2021 the pattern stalled after the low-key arrival of three or so ‘resident’ birds. Sheffield felt like a cold and dank place to live in. The reach of summer was shrinking to a dot and nothing could be done.
Here are some of the notes I’ve posted over the last week, with some added extras:
May 18th 2024
I have come to the conclusion that swifts wheep (wheeping swifts). The first day that they (two of them) have come low over the house so I can see in detail tail, wings, head and beak. A Swift’s flickering wings.
May 18th 2025
One of those days when you think the swifts have packed their bags and gone to the coast. The sky gets busy at about 9pm. Six swifts are weaving overhead. I stand outside with Joseph, back from university, watching a swift - no hesitation - and then another swift vanish into the roof space.
May 19th 2024
I go outside at 9:10pm and see a swift dive and twirl and enter the nest as soon as I make my entrance, as though it was waiting for me.
May 19th 2025
Stepping out this morning, I am greeted by swifts greeting each other.
This afternoon, planes bound for, and departing from Manchester leave their rumblings behind.
This evening, bells ringing down the valley. Four then three then six swifts chasing daylight.
May 20th 2025
I spend my day glancing up at the cries but see nothing. Even today, high octane blue, I am drawn to what has been and is somewhere else now - probably a mile away.
May 21st 2024
Morning. I take the bicycle out from the garage. There is drizzle in the air, the odd spot of rain. As I tug at my heavy bike, a swift appears and comes into the nest from underneath the eaves. It sings to its companions. Or companion?
In the evening, before I go to the pub, just before 9pm - the street is busy with swifts skimming over the rooftops, making their racket.
May 21st 2025
When does something repeated become routine? The skies have been empty - apart from these glinting silver and orange aeroplanes - for most afternoons this week, before, early evening, the swifts leak back, announcing themselves to everyone and no one in particular.
May 22nd 2024
Rain all day. Will I see any swifts today?
May 22nd 2025
At 7am, with the shower on and water washing down the pipe, a swift sings out of brickwork like an anchorite.
May 23rd 2025
Between the marking and admin, the cycle ride, the buying and shopping, a swift’s screech above the rank of shops in Broomhill.
May 24th 2025
It properly rained last night for the first time in weeks, so all the scents are just here, close, a scarf wrapped around my nose and mouth and throat. I can taste the smells.
And now a speckling of swift calls through the day.
Thanks for my reading this post. If you want to read any of my poetry collections, 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 here.
Loving reading your diary Chris. Worried as only spotted 5 or 6 here and we have a large colony usually - though rubbish last year.