Summer is here at last!
Ye gads the Heat! You know it has got hot, because people are wearing funny clothes that they weren’t wearing a few weeks ago. Odd length trousers which look like the wearer has experienced an unplanned growth spurt overnight. A few misguided chaps are even walking about with their tops off, as always happens when the thermometer climbs above 15 degrees, when did that become ok? Which reminds me, I must cancel the milk…
But this social observation aside, the real reason to smile is that summer is officially here, and it’s heralded by a much nicer sight than acres of pallid flesh wobbling along the esplanade.
Swifts are once more overhead, screaming their exuberant welcome in our skies and brightening up even the most stormy summer sky. They are the last migrants to arrive and the first to leave, and they make my heart soar every time I see them. My little house in Exeter is right beneath a colony, so their noisy banter is the soundtrack to summer BBQs, and they have returned to their roosts at the Knowle, so my office is filled with their clamour too as they tear about between the buildings.
There is no getting away from swifts, and there is no way I would want to either. As well as being a special indication of the long days of summer and embarrassing afternoons of cricket, swifts are also amazing animals too.
No other British bird is quite so perfectly built for a life on the wing, when the swift chicks first fledge the nest in a couple of months time they will be taking leap of faith which is pretty much unconceivable. Imagine, you have never flown a yard before, you are miles from the floor, peering from the eaves of a tall building and your only assurance that you can fly is a niggling suspicion in the back of your mind that perhaps you can. You wriggle to the edge of the ledge and allow yourself to fall over the side, you unfold enormous wings, catch the air beneath them and begin a non-stop flight that could last for the next 365 days!
Swifts, once fledged, will not touch a solid object, like the land for example, for up to a year after leaving the nest. They do everything on the wing, eat, sleep, procreate! They only stop flying to lay or incubate eggs, and then they are off again, soaring through the skies like a tiny fighter jet.
They travel vast distances every day on feeding forays, often chasing storm fronts for the insect bounty they provide. And at the end of the day they return to the colony and celebrate a day well spent with some acrobatic flying and tuneless screaming; tuneless maybe, but still music to my ears.
If they do land on the ground they are somewhat stuck, and unlike swallows or housemartins, swifts never ground themselves deliberately. They have no legs to speak of, their lower limbs have shrunk in proportion to their long sickle shaped wings. Little clawed feet are OK for gripping rock faces or the sides of buildings, but no good at powering yourself into the air.
If you do happen upon a swift that has got itself stuck, the chances are it’s a young bird or and old sick bird, either way its life will be curtailed by cats if left to its own devices. If the bird looks healthy then you can try gently launching it into the air – cupping its tiny body and tossing it upwards and away from yourself. If the bird struggles to the floor once again, or worse plummets straight down then you have more of a problem on your hands and you should try and get the bird to the safety of an animal rescue centre. There might not be anything anyone can do, but professionals are best placed to decide this.
Other summer flyers are on the wing again this year, and well worth getting out to look for. Green tiger beetles are abundant on Fire Beacon Hill’s paths and bare ground, patrolling stretches and chasing other tiger beetles with dazzling speed. Chose a sunny morning to go looking for them, and pause anywhere you find a sunny aspect and notice small round holes in the ground. The chances are your approach frightened off the beetle, but it will quickly be back if you wait patiently. On the wing they are easily mistaken for small butterflies, on the ground they look like small emeralds that have sprouted legs!
More about those later in the summer though!