Page 60 - BBC Wildlife Volume 36 #06

Judith Wakelam releases a
swift nestling that she has
painstakingly rehabilitated
– something once thought
impossible – in her kitchen
and spare room. “It is such
a privilege to do it,” she says.

he mid-morning sky is hazy story of this band of nature lovers, busily
and alive with dancing St putting up swift nestboxes in a historic
Mark’s flies – perfect swift market town, and of the 50 or more other
food. We’re scanning the groups that have sprung up in villages,
Wiltshire rooftops through towns and cities nationwide, is among
binoculars, hoping for swifts, the most inspiring in British conservation
but while gazing skywards it today. It is grassroots action at its best –
T is easy to lose your sense of highly effective, and far removed from the
scale. Nope, definitely a fly. And another. bureaucracy of big organisations.
Then, miraculously, they appear. “All summer I live and breathe swifts.
One minute the horizon is birdless, the I dream swifts,” smiles Rowena. “In
next it’s seething with sickle-shaped wings. Bradford-on-Avon they usually turn up on
The swifts are back. Too far away to hear the 4 May, my husband Bill’s birthday, and
thrilling screams that earned them the folk leave around 6 August, my daughter’s
name ‘screecher’, but just knowing they birthday. So swifts circle around these
have returned from Africa safely is enough. major milestones in my life. I love that.”
“Fantastic! A big arrival, and right on Like many other ardent swift fans,
time,” says an excited Rowena Quantrill, Rowena keeps a list of annual arrival and
in whose hillside garden we are swift- departure dates – “my earliest ever record
watching. We enjoy the swifts in silence, is 16 April”, she says – and along with the
as they tear helter-skelter through the warm dozen others in the swift group anticipates
May air – the writer Robert Macfarlane has each spring’s precious first sighting with
called them “boy racers”. Their haste seems a touching reverence. Swifts, after all,
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

See swift
conservation on
SPRINGWATCH
thisJune on