Swift Diaries

The Bricky Air

The cardboard box arrived about a month ago. Six packages wrapped in golden paper. I had to tease the wrapping off one of them to see what the product was like. I wasn’t expecting a galvanised steel oblong crate - but then I hadn’t read much of the advertising literature before the delivery man’s knock on the door. I thought the space inside might be a bit bigger - if two adult swifts raised, say, three chicks - there wouldn’t be much ‘elbow room’ in there. It seemed quite clinical - an outgrown car radio without the knobs and wires. What interested me most though was the ‘hole’, and the stone-effect front-piece that had been bolted on. This block looked a bit like a combination of burnt toast and Grasmere gingerbread (a fine delicacy). Yes, I reasoned, this false facade might well mimic the hundred and fifty year old grubby stones on our house. The hole, though, made me question again the size of things: isn’t this a squeeze for a swift? But why be so surprised: the swifts that enter and leave the nest under our eaves seem to squeeze through a crack no wider than the width of a finger. We stored the bricks in a darkened room as though we were leaving them to mellow and mature before they could be jemmied into place.

Sooner than I expected, we were going to weaponise our house against future indifference or perhaps even hostility toward our summer visitors (I’ve written here about negative attitudes toward sharing a house with swifts). I thought we would eventually have to build-in an alternative to our precarious, crumbling nest — when I’ve got even more grey hair than I have now. But Jo decided we should act sooner rather than later (the swift housing crisis is current, after all) and arranged for the swift bricks to be delivered and installed. Our neighbours on either side of us wanted to get involved too - so we purchased two bricks each - a swift hotel ‘operation’ for the builder.

Jan already had a plan in place before he came around. He sent us ‘mocked up’ photos where the bricks could be positioned on each house - ‘cheese wotsits’ marking optimum locations on the sides or the front face of each residency. When Jan and Ben appeared on the Bank Holiday Monday to fit the boxes, they brought with them a calmness and gentleness that you don’t often associate with building work. There’s plenty of drilling and bashing involved, mind, but because they came with their stories of swifts, parrots, paragliding with vultures in Spain, stationing suns and moons in locations around the world - and with the obvious legacy that their work would leave behind, their actions felt more transformational rather than something remedial or ‘cosmetic’. Putting in six bricks was a six hour job, more or less. Packing in openings that were going to let more light into our homes.

I was hoping we would see swifts above the house on that Monday - a kind of blessing for the ceremonies of the day. But sightings have been few and far between over Crookes in the last week - a circumstance I might return to in next week’s post. When it is wet, windy and cold why bother with South Yorkshire when you’ve got the whole of the sky to choose from?

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Here are the diary entries from notes I have posted this week:

3rd May

The all-day rain-like-mist (or mist-like-rain) has wiped the sky of swifts.

4th May

Jan and Ben arrive soon after 9am to fit swift bricks into our house and our neighbours’ houses on either side. It’s a slow process, chipping out the right sized stones for the galvanised steel boxes to be packed into the face. If you weren’t properly looking, you wouldn’t see the elongated ‘o’, the compact entrance for any prospective swifts to squeeze through. They are still at it at 3pm. Jan tells us he’s fitted over one hundred swift bricks in Sheffield alone. It’s like our rubble-walled Victorian house has just had a hip operation.

5th May

Strange to think all day yesterday, even in the evening sunshine, we saw no signs…until about 8.15pm when a single bird appeared, drawing big and fluent ‘brushstrokes’ over the telephone wires for a few minutes, before it folded its wings into our house.

6th May

Just as I’m bemoaning how the cold northerly and easterly winds are putting paid to early swift sightings, I see a bird low over the garden - a cut-out of a swift - carrying over our roof to disappear into daylight.

7th May

Even with the winds turning southerly, the cloudy skies are big - bigger for being without travellers, mute for most the day.

8th May

The watercolour wash of clouds, undersides the colour of Quink.

I hear its reedy wheeze before I see it. A cameo from a swift - I take it in, mid-sky, look down, glance up again and it has vanished.

Later, a rare moment: two swifts skim over the garden then head off down the valley before they turn the corner of sky.

9th May

The air above our house speaks to me in the voice of a swift.

Later, rain brings down the shutters on the swift emporium, the drafty, damp hangar of sky.