Swift Diaries

Vanishing Act

I made a short video of a swift coming in to nest under the eaves of our house (see my diary entry for May 29th - audio on for the full experience). It’s the first time I’ve ever recorded a bird squeezing between the bricks. For most of the time I prefer to watch the world rather than mediate what is happening through a lens. But seeing as Thursday hadn’t been the best of workdays for myself and my colleagues, I thought I would send this flight to them as a little gift.

The film lasts for six seconds. I missed ‘capturing’ the first bird to enter because I was distracted for the shortest moment as it swooped in. When I saw another swift climb over an opposing roof then dive in my direction I calculated it was about to take its rest for the evening - and I guessed right. This notion of speed and transience, a six second shot, seems fitting for my interactions with swifts. Most days I see swifts out of the corner of my eye. I will hear their wheezy whistles, glance out the window, or look up, but they are nowhere to be seen. I have to remind myself, if you want to catch the swifts, however fleetingly - look up early morning or in crepuscular light. There are other times too when swifts gather together closer to home. When the day is hot sometimes an arrow of swifts will repeat flypasts over our garage. A cloudburst will release two or three swifts, looking darker than ever, low over our street.

There are weeks when I hardly know the swifts are here. It’s partly due to forgetting about them (I’ll write about this at length in a future post), partly due to weather conditions obscuring their location in the sky, me being busy - and of course, the swifts absenting themselves from the neighbourhood to travel…where?

The hard months are the ones where I think the swifts haven’t really arrived in any noticeable number or they’ve departed early, fed up with the cold summer and a lack of insects to feed on. I wonder if swifts have such a pull on people’s imaginations because they inhabit the space above our heads for such a short span of time: from the end of the cherry blossom to the beginning of tomato picking (if it’s been a good year). In the week when I read another article lamenting the demise of the swift population in Britain (here in The Guardian’s Country Diary) it feels like swifts are already thinning to nothing in our collective imaginations, that as a collective noun, they are now glimpsed rather than encountered head-on, in full effect, in three dimensions.

Perhaps in twenty years time this six second clip is all that I will have.

But I don’t buy this narrative. That’s not to say I don’t wonder each year if fewer birds will ‘over-winter’ in Crookes and our nest will eventually fall into disuse (although there would also be a lot of hard-wiring to unpick for this to occur). I think the fact that swifts live most of their lives high over us is a good thing. That they are here-and-gone, spied over one row of houses before they disappear somewhere else, means we have to look harder for them, we have to really concentrate on their shapes and movement, how they dither, pirouette and slide - to take them in. It’s like the way we have to focus when we tune into a fine poem, the best poems weighing silence (space) and language in equal measure. That we so meaningfully mark swifts entrances and exits, particularly after we realise the sky has gone silent in their wake, and that silence lasts for most of the year, might save them in the end.

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All of the diary entries from this week come from 2025. Next week the stories from 2021 and 2024 will be picked up again.

May 25th 2025

We drive over Burbage Moor and skirt past Stanage Edge to Hathersage lido. It’s blustery. Black clouds are chasing white clouds. Often while we swim swifts will skim over our heads, but today there’s not a sign of them. I think I glimpse a swift-shaped silhouette high against a cloud but I might be mistaken.

Later in Ecclesall, three swifts materialise from out of a cloudburst. They are low to the ground because of the rain, as large as I have seen them all May.

May 26th 2025

A low swift in a squall. At this height, you can see its wings working, paddling into the wind. One wing then the other paddling down and up like a wind-up bath toy propelling itself through water.

May 27th 2025

One swift’s screech while I circle round the bathroom mid-morning. The kind of dank, murky day which makes me think of the beginning of Kathleen Jamie’s poem ‘The East Coast’:

Hou come this haar’s

                  hingin ower us            

                             these May forenuins? Nae

yellae on the broom, nae

                      hie-turnin

                                                  hame-wheechin swifts –

May 28th 2025

Six swifts meet up at 7:40am high over the rooftops then go their ways.

I step out into the start of a shower at 1pm to watch swifts low over the chimney pots chasing the raindrops.

At 8:55pm I am out to check out the street moves. Only a minute later a swift tucks itself into brick. It sings and sings to the swifts still turning sky.

May 29th 2025

Spent the first time in a while out front, for a good thirty minutes, watching the swifts swing by. Missed number one (too busy glugging wine) but captured number two.

Singing to each other while I type.

May 30th 2025

I’ve been watching swifts fighting the wind all week. But fighting so isn’t the right word for it. Their element is air.

May 31st 2025

That moment when you’re hanging out the washing and you’re wondering if it’s going to rain in between those long hours of sunshine and the swifts come in low over the garden. And big drops begin to fall.

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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.