Claxton, Norfolk: Swifts are made from nothing but tiny invertebrates floating in the ether
The swifts are going now from our village. In fact, the mad summer fire of their lives is going out not just here, but all over Europe. Perhaps we should pause to enjoy them one last time before the final few depart. I got an inkling that they were on the brink here when the birds all suddenly ceased their usual rooftop village chase and climbed way up until they were no bigger than insects. A single bolus of 20 to 30 swifts spiralled across the blue, hurling down their communal scream, swerving and twisting and suddenly splintering apart; then they would all come together and resume their crazy sky waltz.
The miracle of swifts, perhaps the miracle of all life, is made more apparent if you think of them not as birds, but as insects. For swifts are made from nothing but tiny invertebrates floating in the ether. A flock of 30 and everything about them — that noise, those scintillating movements, their feathers, those air-filled bones as light as grass — is a distillation of billions of insects. And when I say billions, I mean it. A single mouthful of food passed from an adult swift to its chick can contain 300 insects.
Alas, the miracle of swifts is fading. In the past decade they've declined in Britain by 40%. You wonder if we think swifts so miraculous that they'll trigger that final Eureka moment when we really get it: that this whole living landscape is in our hands. Or will they join the turtle dove and skylark and hares and starlings and lapwings and bumblebees and butterflies and moths on that ever-growing list of loss – and will we continue in our unending, self-referential cycle to the drowning cry of "double-dip recession", "quantitative easing", "economic growth"? Just as we might see the swifts' sky-trawl as composed of nothing but insects, we should recall that our own dance consumes almost every other living thing around us.