All Summer, I Live And Breathe Swifts

Across the UK, people from all walks of life are coming together to save the swifts. It’s one of the most inspiring stories in conservation today.

- Ben Hoare

The mid-morning sky is hazy and alive with dancing St Mark’s flies – perfect swift food. We’re scanning the Wiltshire rooftops through binoculars, hoping for swifts, but while gazing skywards it is easy to lose your sense of scale. Nope, definitely a fly. And another. Then, miraculously, they appear.

One minute the horizon is birdless, the next it’s seething with sickle-shaped wings. The swifts are back. Too far away to hear the thrilling screams that earned them the folk name ‘screecher’, but just knowing they have returned from Africa safely is enough.

“Fantastic! A big arrival, and right on time,” says an excited Rowena Quantrill, in whose hillside garden we are swift watching. We enjoy the swifts in silence, as they tear helter-skelter through the warm May air – the writer Robert Macfarlane has called them “boy racers”. Their haste seems at odds with the genteel, honeyed stone streets of Bradford-on-Avon down below. “Funny how some species of bird attract groupies like me,” Rowena says. “Swifts are one of those. They take over your life!”

Rowena is a founding member of a small but thriving swift conservation group. The story of this band of nature lovers, busily putting up swift nest boxes in a historic market town, and of the 50 or more other groups that have sprung up in villages, towns and cities nationwide, is among the most inspiring in British conservation today. It is grassroots action at its best – highly effective, and far removed from the bureaucracy of big organisations.

“All summer I live and breathe swifts. I dream swifts,” smiles Rowena. “In Bradford-on-Avon they usually turn up on 4 May, my husband Bill’s birthday, and leave around 6 August, my daughter’s birthday. So swifts circle around these major milestones in my life. I love that.”