I often see folks draw on, recount Ted Hughes’s poem ‘Swifts’ when they first spy incomers in the spring of each new year. These lines are favoured in particular:
They’ve made it again,
Which means the globe’s still working, the Creation’s
Still waking refreshed, our summer’s
Still all to come —
I do find this poem fascinating, partly because Hughes chucks the whole kitchen sink at describing these birds, partly because it echoes an Anne Stevenson poem - which is also called ‘Swifts’ (Stevenson: ‘You shout, ‘The swifts are back!’ Hughes: ‘Look! They’re back! Look!’) but mostly because of this opening line: ‘Fifteenth of May. Cherry blossom.’ I mean, isn’t this a little late to be catching a first sight of swifts? And cherry blossom? You’d be hard pressed now to find any cherry blossom around here (I’m writing this on May 17th). Maybe it was a particularly cold spring, or that’s just when the swifts arrived in Hughes’s neck of the woods. There are plenty of regional differences, and swift numbers do increase through the month. At one point in the poem though, Hughes asks ‘are they too early?’ What, on your Devon farm, Ted? Fascinating. Perhaps we might posit that it’s not so much ‘the globe’s still working’ but the ‘globe’s…working differently’, that in the fifty years since Hughes wrote this poem swifts migratory patterns have altered. It would be intriguing to find out if there was any evidence to suggest that this is happening.
Maybe I’m just looking at Hughes’s poem through my 2025 sunglasses. Keeping a record of these birds, however haphazardly over the past few years, has taught me never to speak with confidence about any trends or possible outcomes. The diary entries I present from 2021, 2024 and 2025, I think show my in-the-moment daily reflections refracted through a wide lens of guesswork, and occasional bafflement. But taken together, the entries do tell a story.
To recap, my earliest encounter with swifts happens this year, on March 30th. I first see swifts (‘outliers’) on May 6th in 2024 and on May 8th in 2021. It’s warm enough (and wet at times) in 2024, but I’m already complaining about the cold, grey skies and lack of birds in 2021. My lack of patience does me no good. Even with 2025s long fetch of sunshine, I think more birds are circling over our house in early May 2024 (I pick out ten swifts on May 10th). Until last night. Last night high high up there were swifts pulling about the sky - maybe a dozen of them (it’s hard work counting swifts). So even as I make some declaration, the swifts undermine my pronouncements and certainties.
Whether I know we have a pair of swifts nesting in our eaves seems like a straightforward equation to solve from year to year, but early in the season I would have to be out early, at just the right instant, to see birds escaping the confines of the house. It’s easier to hang around at dusk to count them in. Some evenings, in between everything else, I sit on the step outside the front door and watch the show. They fly in pairs, threes, groups, separating then coming together again. Sometimes I see a lone outrider, though this always feels odd, like a left hand without a right hand. In 2021 I am still waiting to see a swift enter the crack in the brickwork by the middle of May. In fact I am so despondent about the no-show I stop looking up after a while. In 2024 a swift ‘hits beneath the roof and disappears’ on May 11th - a first proof of nesting. This year, a swift occupies the space above our bathroom already by 4th May. I have to wait ten days to hear the call and response of two swifts in the nest. Last night I watched a swift complete an airy flourish, like it was practising its signature, before folding through brick at 8.50pm. About twenty minutes later a swift fell from the sky and didn’t stop. I’ve never seen a swift do this. Birds come in to land low over the rooftops. In one movement it adjusted, turned and slipped into darkness.
Here are some of the notes I’ve posted over the week, with some added extras:
May 11th 2021
A deluge. Mountain-range thunder. That full 360 degree effect, moving around us like tankers on a grey sea as we play football. Swifts are nowhere to be seen.
May 11th 2024
Intermittent watching through the day. I hear them first and then look up. I stay with them (about ten swifts) from 8pm onwards - first in the back garden, then I go round to the front. Pairs circle overhead from time to time. It’s the fly-past between ours and our neighbour’s house that I’m looking out for. By 8.55-9pm I’m doubting we’ll see a swift entering the roof space. And then one comes over our neighbour’s roof and takes three practice goes - toward then away, looping and slowing then pulling away, and finally hits beneath the roof and disappears.
May 11 2025
Two swifts dance over our road late morning. Later, there’s a group of six or seven in the blue tank of sky. I go out just after 8pm to catch their patterns of flight. The swift that resides in our eaves dips down and up into the nest at about 8.30pm. Another swift hangs over our house at about 8.50pm to 9pm. I wonder if it is the partner, only for it to disappear into the night.
May 12th 2021
I stepped out of the front of the house tonight and looked up to see if we were due any visitors. I waited until the street lights were on before I came inside. The two swifts that float over our property I think are nesting on Bradley Street. You can see by their flying patterns, particularly around dusk, that they’re not anchored to our road.
May 12th 2025
Another blue popsicle sky. Depending on when I search through the afternoon I see anything from no to eight swifts circumnavigating the fresh easterly breeze.
I have never seen a swift struggle so much to squeeze into the nest. Tonight on its first attempt at entry, the swift bounced out off the brickwork. Second try it tucked itself in behind the wooden gutter’s strut.
May 13th 2024
The last day of sunshine before rain is forecast - though it’s a bit colder than preceding days. The swifts are away for most of the time - and when I go out looking for them after 8pm they are few and far between. I play the RSPB swift call on my phone - and after a number of attempts - I get a call back from the (lone?) swift in the nest.
May 14th 2024
You hear them before you see them. Far off. It is raining early doors so no sign of them. A couple at lunchtime low above the street. I drive to see Mark and Nikki in Grindleford and we discuss swallows, martins and swifts. We spot a swift circling over the rich green valley. Nikki says they don’t cry out like ours do.
May 14th 2025
In the evening I go to a lecture on Dylan Thomas - who was, the lecturer contends, an Ecopoet toward the end of his life. I cycle back uphill, turning left at the university so I can pass through the park, freewheeling down past the football pitches and then slowly climbing towards home. I arrive at about 8.55pm, time to see a swift swing into the nest. It cries and in return does another swift cry back?
May 15th 2024
Four swifts at dusk. I watch a swift, still only one, scull backward to slow itself as it enters under the eaves.
May 16th 2024
One of those days when I almost miss the swifts. Walking back from football with Joe we talk swifts, hearing them pipe about our heads. At the end of the road, we watch them twist and dance over the rooftops.
May 17th 2025
The swifts have left us for most of the day, returning in fragments of speed and song. Later, we go over to Nether Edge for a poetry reading and hear, above the bowling green, a swift’s cry - though it’s nowhere to be seen.
I’m glad it’s not just me that has those internal conversations with poets and poems.
I can understand it being complicated sometimes to count the swifts in flight but it sounds like you’re able to recognise ‘your’ swifts? I imagine seeing them coming in and out of their penthouse apartment door is one way but I wondered if you can also tell them apart visually and/or audibly? My experience has always been either birds bimbling around my feet or flying some distance above me. With the former I can appreciate markings and personality - even if it’s very brief interaction. Once they take flight it’s just a rushed impression of the idea of a bird rather than anything more identifiable..