Screaming over Calder House, by Kwame Yeadon
An original contemporary blog.
Every year, somewhere around the first week of May, I start looking up. I do it at the bus stop, on the walk to work, from the window of the eleventh-floor flat where I have lived for nine years. My neighbours have stopped asking what I am staring at. They know. I am waiting for the swifts.
If you have never paid attention to a swift, let me introduce you. It is a small, dark, sickle-shaped bird that spends almost its entire life in the air. It eats in flight, drinks in flight and even sleeps in flight, dozing on the wing high above the ground. A young swift that leaves its nest may not touch the ground again for two or three years. Every winter they fly to Africa. Every spring, astonishingly, many of them come back to the exact same nest.
Five years ago, Calder House had no swifts at all. Our block is concrete, built in the 1960s, and about as wildlife-friendly as a car park. Then the housing association replaced the windows, and a man called Roland Fishwick, who lives on the fourth floor and used to be a postman, asked whether they would mind fitting a few nest boxes under the roofline while the scaffolding was up. They said yes, mainly, I suspect, to make him go away. Twenty-four boxes went up.
The first year, nothing. The second year, one pair. Last summer, seventeen of the twenty-four boxes were occupied.
Which brings me to this week. On Tuesday evening, just after eight, I was washing up when I heard it: a thin, high, electric scream, like a whistle being dragged across glass. I dropped the sponge. I went to the window. And there they were, a dozen of them, tearing around the side of the building at what looked like impossible speed, wings pinned back, screaming as they went. They swept past my window so close I could see their tiny white chins. Then they were gone, round the corner, and then they were back.
I am forty-six years old, and I punched the air.
Within ten minutes, the residents’ group chat had exploded. ‘THEY’RE BACK,’ wrote Roland, in capitals, followed by eleven exclamation marks. A teenager I have only ever seen wearing headphones sent a single word: ‘Sick.’ By half past eight there were people on the grass outside the block, heads tipped back, pointing, laughing, holding up phones.
Think about where those birds have been. Since August they have crossed the Sahara twice. They have flown perhaps ten thousand miles, and they have found their way, somehow, back to one particular gap under the gutter of one particular tower block on the edge of a Yorkshire town. I find that almost unbearably moving.
Swift numbers in Britain have more than halved since the 1990s, partly because new buildings and renovations have sealed up the holes they nest in. Twenty-four wooden boxes will not reverse that. But they have done something to this block. For a few weeks every summer, a building full of people who barely say hello to each other in the lift will stop on the grass at dusk and look up together.
They will be here until August. Then one morning they will simply be gone. I will miss them already.
The return of the swifts to Calder House is described as a thrilling event. How does the writer try to show this?
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