Apus apus ~ common swift

Common Swift (various wools) August 2025

My first blog is an apt quietly whispered piece. Written in the summer of 2024, this was the moment that inspired me to make flying swifts in wool. I have two completed so far but, knowing the multitude of shapes and patterns every time you watch swifts, I suspect I will have more of them flying on my sitting room walls soon enough. I thought you might like to read my thoughts at what was a very special moment for me last year.

I have the hugest grin on my face. I've just seen the most beautiful spectacle right outside the window where I sit at my desk. It's 8am and the swifts are swooping down to my eye level, flying in formation past the glass. Squadrons of hunters are catching the tiny flies I can see hovering in the air, each bird screaming as it glides, delighted by the diptera-smorgesboard laid out before them.

I knew the swifts flew like this as I've watched them from below quartering the terrace-lined streets many times before. But not on my street. It has always been someone else's street, and typically as I rushed for the bus or to catch a swim before missing hightide. I have soaked in the sound of the screams and quiet, quick chirrups whilst gardening at the back of the house. But today was so very different but I felt I was there, high up with the birds.

I woke early and really was fully awake, ready to get up before 6am, not groggy and wanting to turn over and snooze. I had gone to sleep thinking about and woken still with my thoughts on a set of fibre feathers I am making. I was ready for an early start on and went to sit at my narrow desk without hesitation. Focused on what is a rather involved making process, including wire, whisps of wool, glue and paintbrushes, I slowly became aware of dark shadows on my somewhat dirty window. It was the sensation of speed that I couldn't quite take in and caused me to lift my attention from the wool. In the few seconds, a lifetime in terms of their flights, it took my mind to process what I was seeing, the swifts began to repeatedly come right down beneath the roof just by my head, swerving in against the brickwork into the alcove of my window and taking flies in the bright June sunlight. I could see their incredible wings in close-up, every detail lit in the low summer sunshine and not in silhouette as usual against the sky. The wing was rigid like a plane wing, curved, feathered, brown and grey, slight and delicate, and utterly, utterly splendid.

They have no brakes. It seems to me, by committing entirely to each sweep forwards, trusting the air and their feathers to hold together, to flex to their command and take them precisely where they intend to be, they simply engage with the spaces between things. Like gannets plunging beneath the waves, the descent into the street between the houses is simply diving - breaking a surface, popping the meniscus of heavier air to inhabit the subliminal, a space not meant for them taken just the same. They conquer thoroughly these gaps we humans leave them. Imagine what they would do if we actually encourage them to live close to us.

The space between our tiny terraced houses here in Whitstable can be very tight. Cars find it cryptically difficult to park on my street given the narrowness and we have specially sized bin lorries to make the turns at each end once a week. Yet it's here, in this tightest of spaces, where tens of swifts flying together swoop at glinting car roof height up to tiled church roof summit and away over the stone-cross pinnacles in precise formation. They twine round each other's flight paths, wings strident and beaks open to call and catch.

Even if you don't realise that they have flown without pause from South Africa to be here in this tiny coastal town, or that they eat, sleep, mate whilst in flight - only landing to nest in bare spaces behind our soffit boards scouted in the summer before for youngsters and returned to time and time again for the older mature birds, a moment of watching their flight will hook you. Look up at them. That is all it takes to see their majesty. And maybe you can listen to them too, as they screech out their joy in the heights above our heads. There are networks of like-minded swift lovers now across most towns and cities working to protect and welcome them back to our in-between spaces. They work with national projects and charities to offer more nestboxes and use tiny speakers to attract the swifts to spaces where they will be safe and undisturbed. Because disturbance and change is what defeats them. Block that familiar nesting space from them, knowingly or not, after such a huge commitment of energy to get here, they will be gone. And the loss of this bird, the curved slicer of the air who fill the skies with their wondrous lightness of being, may just be the last cut that stops the earth turning.