This is turning out to be not just a sunless and sodden summer, but a swiftless one too. Where are the swifts?
I have not seen one. Swallows aplenty, martins galore, but not a single swift. What has happened? Has the cold kept them in the south? Were they massacred by French farmers as they battled through headwinds to get through to their traditional nesting grounds in Ireland? Has some climate change in Africa made the journey here impossible? Have their breeding habits changed?
Whatever the reason, are they, like the bustard, the bittern and the woodpecker, no longer to be avian natives here? It is not a pretty thought, for the swift is the most perfect flying machine which nature has invented. I imagine it was watching the swift which beguiled so many pioneers of aviation into thinking that all that they needed to do in order to fly was to leap from a high point, flap a wing or two and hey presto, behold the sun; instead, splat.
Effortless flight
For virtually all other birds seem to make flight hard work, apart from the bone-idle indolents like the seagull and the eagle, which drift on air currents. No one can look at a sparrow or a robin in flight and think: that looks easy. But the fast flight of a swift does genuinely look effortless. So, you might say, does that of the chough or the jackdaw; but they are merely parasitic hanggliders, dependent on the wind. The swift is different. It arcs through wind like an arrow; it can fly into the gale or go with it, adjusting the vane-feathers on its wings so that it never stalls.
It is sublime: simple in appearance, complex in construction, perfect in function - the triangle which maddens designers everywhere. We might do many things to emulate the great creator, but we will never make anything approaching the perfection of the swift. As an example of ergonomic aerodynamics, it is faultless; in no medium is any beast as paramount as the swift is in the air.
The swift has been, until this summer anyway, one of the most visually available of birds: it needs very little ornithological skills to separate the swift from those unrelated companions in the evening sky, the swallows and the martins. For the swift is pure blade, an aerial rapier beside which the humble hirundo rustica is an anvil. Yet despite its obviousness, we know little about it. The swift is a mystery: what does it do with its life?
From the time it leaves its nest in the late summer to the time it returns here to breed in the midsummer following, virtually nothing is known about what the swift is up to, other than this: between nest and nesting ten months apart, it flies at least a quarter-of-a-million miles, eating on the wing, drinking on the wing, sleeping on the wing and mating on the wing.
Astounding feat
That figure of a quarter-of-a-million miles could well be conservative; for whereas it is known that swifts can fly at 70 m.p.h., in the dark hours of flight, when it lofts invisibly onto high winds at great but unknown heights, it could be flying at virtually any speed: 10 m.p.h. or 100 m.p.h., and presumably in some form of circle so it remains close to its base.
Does not that feat simply astound you? That while swallows and martins roost as we slumber and birds everywhere are perched on branches and wires, above us through the night the swift alone keeps to the air in the one general region - and whether sleeplessly or sleeping yet still flying on some astonishing autopilot, we do not know. But first thing in the morning as light arrives and insects rise, the swifts are there to catch them above the same fields which they were haunting the day before.
Navigational aids What navigational aids do they have in the dark, in the cloud, flying at speed, to fix themselves in the one general area? No doubt one day scientists will tell us how it is done, with magnetic lines and stars and movement of moon, and maybe too with forces or fields we have yet not discovered. But the tiny brain of the swift, no bigger than a salmon's eye, discovered these forces and these fields and mastered the arts of navigation by the pull of the moon or the glow of the stars before we came to this planet, and in a perfect body which has maddened man since Icarus; and up until this summer, I would have said, will do so long after we are gone.
If the swiftlessness of this abominable summer were merely local to the skies above me in Kildare, it might not be so disturbing; but I have seen swifts nowhere, nor heard their distant whisper as they trawl the high skies for tiny insects. Has some calamity befallen them? Is some plague at work? Or is it simply that, wise fellows that they are, they have recognised that in the year of 1998, Ireland is not a country that is worth visiting, but that next year they will be back? The latter, let us hope: a swiftless summer is no summer at all, as this sad and sorry season is wetly and daily reminding us.