Devil Birds

One sign of the returning summer is the return of the swifts.  Not as common as they used to be, but still I think I have seen them everywhere I have lived. Or rather I did once I became aware of them, and especially their unearthly screaming as they hurtle around the houses in courting and hunting packs.  I found out recently that not much is known about them, and I was reading in 'Nature Abounding' (a collection of natural history writings pub'd in 1943) that the birds sleep on the wing at great heights, and only return to 'earth' in the mornings; even so they are far above the tallest buildings and trees.  And this was confirmed by Springwatch this month, the swifts leave their nest as fledglings and will not return to dry land for up to four years.  To them the physical earth is the smallest part of the world.  

I associate them with the summer, the return of the summer, and inevitably with holidays.  I remember them in Amsterdam and Harlem, and especially out over the river Indre in France.  I sat for a lazy morning reading and watching the birds over the town and the river below me, watching great balls of swifts feeding first over one site and then another as the insects moved and rose in the air.  And I spent a whole summer, it seems now, watching them over Sydenham in south London, the long hot summer of 1996 where I had nowhere to go and spent it in the garden; the distant rumble of traffic, the wind in the trees and the occasional bleat of a sheep from the school grounds where they had three sheep and some chickens. And overhead and around the houses that weird, terrifying shriek of the swifts.  No wonder they used to be called devil birds.