There is nothing as exhilarating as seeing a squadron of swifts flash past you as they scream between the rooftops on a summers evening, especially if, like me, they are your favourite bird!
Photographically I have never had much luck with them as they are so manoeuvrable and totally unpredictable in their flight patterns, unlike an aircraft. Getting close enough for a decent sized image is also a challenge. However, where I live at the moment we are lucky enough to have a small colony nesting in a house across the road and, with our house on the corner of a cul-de-sac, we are part of the circuit, with the birds zooming past left or right around us and I love to stand and watch them with wings flashing, almost swimming through the air, their voices screaming with the sheer exuberance of flight, what magnificent birds!
Last weekend I spent an hour in the garden waving my telephoto lens around like a madman as I tried to track them and was only lucky when they came off a circuit and kind of relaxed as they gained altitude. Needless to say a lot of frames were wasted but I did get a couple of keepers, this one being the best and I am well pleased to have captured this image which will remind during the long winter months that summer, and the mad, screaming, octane fuelled lifestyle Swifts will be here again.
However, there is an edge of poignancy to the image. Swifts are confirmation of the continuing natural cycles of the planet. The sense of anticipation at the end of April, beginning of May every year as I search the skies to spot my first Swifts of the season. The sense of loss in early August when I realise ‘my’ Swifts have departed leaving the skies suddenly empty, the flight of other birds strangely perfunctory and utilitarian. It also means the days of summer are marked and the season is already waning - Autumn will be here before I know it! Yet these thoughts are always countered with the knowledge that 'my' Swifts, these birds that only spend a third of their year in our skies, will be back again next year. But in the last ten years the Swift population has declined dramatically and it is thought that loss of nesting sites may be to blame as buildings are renovated or repaired and the small openings to nooks and crannies that the birds use are blocked up.
With climate change, population pressure and habitat loss already driving species to the brink it is perhaps not unexpected that the Swift will suffer too. I just hope that action can be taken to reverse the decline. A good source of information on this can be found at www.rspb.org.uk