It wouldn’t have been such a crisis if I hadn’t been about to go away for 3 weeks. I wouldn’t have felt such a desperate need to decide, to act. Now I’m back, this is all old news, but it seems right to say how the story developed:
Survival of the cutest #1
The day after I last posted I did of course crack. I Googled. I made phone calls. I scoured the local phone directory. I made more phone calls.
To feed a swift chick, take live mealworms, drown them in water, then feed them to the chick, using tweezers. (The tweezers are to save the swift’s sensibilities, not yours. And no, in this case we are not on the side of the mealworms.)
It was Sunday, of course. By the time I’d found one place in our small town which sells mealworms – dried – on a Sunday, my mum had been on the phone, too. It looked increasingly certain that all adult swifts in our area had reached their time for going, and gone.
It was warm in the loft, but not too oppressive, as we set up the stepladders. The corner stank comfortingly of nesting swifts, but there was no sound. Had I imagined it? No such luck. Once I’d pulled away the protective barrier of chicken wire and shone my torch onto the ledge, the twiggy silhouette I’d seen so often was starkly, mundanely interpretable. A neat nest – the starlings’ legacy – with two small forms slumped inside.
I was far gone on adrenalin and emotion. The stillness was ominous: had I left them long enough to starve, after all? Rapidly I reached in, picked up the larger shape in one hand, babbling incoherent words of love as it moved slightly. I held the wings closed, those lovely wings. Into the cardboard box, onto the softly crumpled tissue paper. I hovered my hand over it and reached for its sibling. Thank goddess for headtorches.
It’s true, then. Swifts go into a torpor during the day, waiting for food. All my fears of beak and claw and clifftop disasters came to just two sleepy, vaguely resentful little beings in a box.
We had the operation all planned out. Straight into the waiting car, leaving a message on the sanctuary’s ansaphone. I cradled the precious box for 45 travelling minutes, my heart drugged with love for the newness and beauty of the life inside.
The room in the sanctuary was awful. It stank of other animals, and was loud with their calls. But the people seemed kind enough, and knew more than I did. I watched in horror as my beautiful wild creatures were placed on a couple of scraps of blue paper hand towel. They lurked together, heads into the corner of their new cardboard box. Apparently wild creatures routinely cope with such treatment, learn to accept what humans can give, then go out again, as if unchanged, back into habitat.
All the way back I was shattered with guilt, weeping in the back of the car. I’d interfered, taken them from their splendidly appropriate wall-top home, where brood after brood had lived or died before them, and forced them into a place of bizarre stressful ugliness, and into dependence on yet more human interference. A friend rescued me with beer and food, and cheerful arguments of how life likes being alive, and how given the choice swift chicks would rather be alive than dead – especially if there was a bellyful of mealworms involved. Solitary midnight packing follwed, with the 8:45 am train to catch in the morning.
Survival of the cutest #2
The loft was desolate that night without the chicks. There was no sign of any adults, either, which was a little balm to my guilty conscience. Silence. I lay there, missing them.
Until 6am. "Skreep! Skreep!"
Goddess bless. No. It can’t be… I clumped the stepladder back out of storage, clattered up it, lurched towards the nest, blasting it with my impatient torch, demanding to find out what was there. A solitary dark, feathered shape hunkered down, mistrustfully, trying to get out of reach of this huge critter which had torn a hole in the sky, instinctively calculating that I was big enough to open my beak and swallow it whole.
I’d missed one. The humour was intellectually obvious, but I was too trashed to feel it. Not yet. The guilt, on the other hand, was instant.
I packed. Ate breakfast. Rehoused my fungus culture outside. Checked anything I could preparatory to many days away. Met my parents as soon as they emerged, broke the news. Bless them. They didn’t hesitate, declared there was only one thing to be done.
Another cardboard box. Another stash of tissue paper. We waited as long as possible to give the critter a chance to calm down, to achieve its daytime stupor.
Car ready. Torch on forehead. Stepladders up.
I ripped the whole nest apart, pulled away the surrounding insulation. Huge, intrusive human. No wonder I’d been so timid, watching them before from the shadows: I was afraid of the effect I could have, of what I could do. Determined to find the bird, I destroyed its entire home, effortlessly.
What I couldn’t do, though, was find the last chick. It remained wild – and presumably died soon after, of hunger and cold. That’s the Way of it. Small birds die – otherwise the ecosystem would be overrun with birds, and everything would die. And humans get emotionally attached, and mourn, and juggle their priorities. That’s the way of it, too. I could have searched all morning, but I didn’t. I could’ve stayed there the next night, listening. Instead, I just managed to catch the train I thought I’d given up, and I sat on it, writing these words, and gradually stopping crying. Words can soothe. It’s a human thing.
Swifts are simple. They do swift things, and when conditions are right, they breed and live on. When conditions are wrong, they die. It’s a system, it’s worked for a long time, and the beauty it produces is astounding.
Humans are adaptable, frighteningly adaptable. They evolve socially, skills and knowledge and technology, and there’s no knowing what they’ll do next – and the ugliness they produce can be appalling. It scares me, being human. I’ve spent much of my life frozen with the fear of doing the wrong thing – and knowing all the while that what I love is being destroyed.
This time I acted. Not out of deep love for ecology, but out of base sentiment. The sounds of those birds comforted me when I slept and when I woke, and I loved them, and I didn’t want them to die.
The emotions that drove me are jagged, and shifting. I almost feel better about the bird that got away, and died, than about the two I may have saved, in defiance of the Law.
In Oxford, many eggs were lost this year due to the cold, wet May. On our swift ledge, I found two old, unhatched eggs. The chicks that called in the night were a second brood, raised late – too late, it seems, for our shorter northern season. Conditions meant that they would die.
Checkout the swifts in the tower. It’s a great project. They let the swifts nest in their ventilations shafts, they observe them, they ring them, they record them, they let them live, and presumably they let them die. And yet when the swifts have a good breeding season, the human joy leaks right out through the terse diary on the website.
Survival of the cutest #3
The next morning I woke at 5:30, in a flat in Edinburgh. I heard birds calling, almost thought I heard swifts. I cried for an hour. Later in the day I did see swifts, flying below the window. Edinburgh’s high tenements should be able to provide magnificent nesting sites for them.
Survival of the cutest #4
It was about 10am when I got the phone call. The people at the sanctuary hadn’t forgotten my desperate craving for news.
They’d tried to feed the chicks, but all the freshly-drowned mealworms were regurgitated back up. Thoughtfully, the proprietor, an experienced man, checked out their feathers (did I mention the chicks’ lovely, glossy feathers?), noticed their plump condition, and decided to take them outside.
"It sounds awful, but the lawn is really very soft." The second chick, when thrown up into the air, fell straight down. The man tried again: same result. I’ve been told that a swift – even a fully competent adult – is helpless if it lands on the ground. He picked it up a third time, and threw it upwards. This time it flew, straight and sudden, hurtling out of sight with the flawless control that is the way of its kind. He’d seen other birds crash into hedges on their first flight, but not this one. Its boxed sibling had done even better, getting the idea first time. We haven’t found a feathered corpse below their nesting site, either, so can only hope that the third chick, the one I scared with my torch in the morning, slipped over the edge and found its wings before it reached the ground, three storeys below.
Just don’t do it
The moral is obvious. Follow the rules. Part of the law is this: if you allow habitat to exist, the critters will come. If you remove habitat, critters will die. Another part of the law is this: don’t get involved. I’ve no way of knowing how much damage I caused by traumatising those chicks, how much of their vital energy I cost them, whether they will survive or die, whether some sign of what I did will remain in the spring, warning the adults away from the ledge they’ve occupied for 30 years or more.
So don’t get sentimental about wildlife. It’s stupid, and often destructive.
Swallows
The swifts had gone from Port Meadow in Oxford, as well, when I was down there, even though there were still chicks to be seen on the webcam. (Funny, that...)
But there were swallows. Looking at swifts, just for the pleasure of it, has somehow trained my fuzzy eyes to be more quick, or my brain to be more confident, at watching other bird shapes flying. Swallows have something of the same habit as my dark gothic loves, but are so different, too. How could I ever have confused the two? Swallows with those curves, those contrasts of light and dark. Their little tweeting sounds are quite distinctive, too – they’re beginning to stand out from the background of unidentified bird sounds and be a signal that grabs my ears and turns my eyes to the sky.
They are also, now I happen to notice it, very, very cute…
Survival of the cutest #1
The day after I last posted I did of course crack. I Googled. I made phone calls. I scoured the local phone directory. I made more phone calls.
To feed a swift chick, take live mealworms, drown them in water, then feed them to the chick, using tweezers. (The tweezers are to save the swift’s sensibilities, not yours. And no, in this case we are not on the side of the mealworms.)
It was Sunday, of course. By the time I’d found one place in our small town which sells mealworms – dried – on a Sunday, my mum had been on the phone, too. It looked increasingly certain that all adult swifts in our area had reached their time for going, and gone.
It was warm in the loft, but not too oppressive, as we set up the stepladders. The corner stank comfortingly of nesting swifts, but there was no sound. Had I imagined it? No such luck. Once I’d pulled away the protective barrier of chicken wire and shone my torch onto the ledge, the twiggy silhouette I’d seen so often was starkly, mundanely interpretable. A neat nest – the starlings’ legacy – with two small forms slumped inside.
I was far gone on adrenalin and emotion. The stillness was ominous: had I left them long enough to starve, after all? Rapidly I reached in, picked up the larger shape in one hand, babbling incoherent words of love as it moved slightly. I held the wings closed, those lovely wings. Into the cardboard box, onto the softly crumpled tissue paper. I hovered my hand over it and reached for its sibling. Thank goddess for headtorches.
It’s true, then. Swifts go into a torpor during the day, waiting for food. All my fears of beak and claw and clifftop disasters came to just two sleepy, vaguely resentful little beings in a box.
We had the operation all planned out. Straight into the waiting car, leaving a message on the sanctuary’s ansaphone. I cradled the precious box for 45 travelling minutes, my heart drugged with love for the newness and beauty of the life inside.
The room in the sanctuary was awful. It stank of other animals, and was loud with their calls. But the people seemed kind enough, and knew more than I did. I watched in horror as my beautiful wild creatures were placed on a couple of scraps of blue paper hand towel. They lurked together, heads into the corner of their new cardboard box. Apparently wild creatures routinely cope with such treatment, learn to accept what humans can give, then go out again, as if unchanged, back into habitat.
All the way back I was shattered with guilt, weeping in the back of the car. I’d interfered, taken them from their splendidly appropriate wall-top home, where brood after brood had lived or died before them, and forced them into a place of bizarre stressful ugliness, and into dependence on yet more human interference. A friend rescued me with beer and food, and cheerful arguments of how life likes being alive, and how given the choice swift chicks would rather be alive than dead – especially if there was a bellyful of mealworms involved. Solitary midnight packing follwed, with the 8:45 am train to catch in the morning.
Survival of the cutest #2
The loft was desolate that night without the chicks. There was no sign of any adults, either, which was a little balm to my guilty conscience. Silence. I lay there, missing them.
Until 6am. "Skreep! Skreep!"
Goddess bless. No. It can’t be… I clumped the stepladder back out of storage, clattered up it, lurched towards the nest, blasting it with my impatient torch, demanding to find out what was there. A solitary dark, feathered shape hunkered down, mistrustfully, trying to get out of reach of this huge critter which had torn a hole in the sky, instinctively calculating that I was big enough to open my beak and swallow it whole.
I’d missed one. The humour was intellectually obvious, but I was too trashed to feel it. Not yet. The guilt, on the other hand, was instant.
I packed. Ate breakfast. Rehoused my fungus culture outside. Checked anything I could preparatory to many days away. Met my parents as soon as they emerged, broke the news. Bless them. They didn’t hesitate, declared there was only one thing to be done.
Another cardboard box. Another stash of tissue paper. We waited as long as possible to give the critter a chance to calm down, to achieve its daytime stupor.
Car ready. Torch on forehead. Stepladders up.
I ripped the whole nest apart, pulled away the surrounding insulation. Huge, intrusive human. No wonder I’d been so timid, watching them before from the shadows: I was afraid of the effect I could have, of what I could do. Determined to find the bird, I destroyed its entire home, effortlessly.
What I couldn’t do, though, was find the last chick. It remained wild – and presumably died soon after, of hunger and cold. That’s the Way of it. Small birds die – otherwise the ecosystem would be overrun with birds, and everything would die. And humans get emotionally attached, and mourn, and juggle their priorities. That’s the way of it, too. I could have searched all morning, but I didn’t. I could’ve stayed there the next night, listening. Instead, I just managed to catch the train I thought I’d given up, and I sat on it, writing these words, and gradually stopping crying. Words can soothe. It’s a human thing.
Swifts are simple. They do swift things, and when conditions are right, they breed and live on. When conditions are wrong, they die. It’s a system, it’s worked for a long time, and the beauty it produces is astounding.
Humans are adaptable, frighteningly adaptable. They evolve socially, skills and knowledge and technology, and there’s no knowing what they’ll do next – and the ugliness they produce can be appalling. It scares me, being human. I’ve spent much of my life frozen with the fear of doing the wrong thing – and knowing all the while that what I love is being destroyed.
This time I acted. Not out of deep love for ecology, but out of base sentiment. The sounds of those birds comforted me when I slept and when I woke, and I loved them, and I didn’t want them to die.
The emotions that drove me are jagged, and shifting. I almost feel better about the bird that got away, and died, than about the two I may have saved, in defiance of the Law.
In Oxford, many eggs were lost this year due to the cold, wet May. On our swift ledge, I found two old, unhatched eggs. The chicks that called in the night were a second brood, raised late – too late, it seems, for our shorter northern season. Conditions meant that they would die.
Checkout the swifts in the tower. It’s a great project. They let the swifts nest in their ventilations shafts, they observe them, they ring them, they record them, they let them live, and presumably they let them die. And yet when the swifts have a good breeding season, the human joy leaks right out through the terse diary on the website.
Survival of the cutest #3
The next morning I woke at 5:30, in a flat in Edinburgh. I heard birds calling, almost thought I heard swifts. I cried for an hour. Later in the day I did see swifts, flying below the window. Edinburgh’s high tenements should be able to provide magnificent nesting sites for them.
Survival of the cutest #4
It was about 10am when I got the phone call. The people at the sanctuary hadn’t forgotten my desperate craving for news.
They’d tried to feed the chicks, but all the freshly-drowned mealworms were regurgitated back up. Thoughtfully, the proprietor, an experienced man, checked out their feathers (did I mention the chicks’ lovely, glossy feathers?), noticed their plump condition, and decided to take them outside.
"It sounds awful, but the lawn is really very soft." The second chick, when thrown up into the air, fell straight down. The man tried again: same result. I’ve been told that a swift – even a fully competent adult – is helpless if it lands on the ground. He picked it up a third time, and threw it upwards. This time it flew, straight and sudden, hurtling out of sight with the flawless control that is the way of its kind. He’d seen other birds crash into hedges on their first flight, but not this one. Its boxed sibling had done even better, getting the idea first time. We haven’t found a feathered corpse below their nesting site, either, so can only hope that the third chick, the one I scared with my torch in the morning, slipped over the edge and found its wings before it reached the ground, three storeys below.
Just don’t do it
The moral is obvious. Follow the rules. Part of the law is this: if you allow habitat to exist, the critters will come. If you remove habitat, critters will die. Another part of the law is this: don’t get involved. I’ve no way of knowing how much damage I caused by traumatising those chicks, how much of their vital energy I cost them, whether they will survive or die, whether some sign of what I did will remain in the spring, warning the adults away from the ledge they’ve occupied for 30 years or more.
So don’t get sentimental about wildlife. It’s stupid, and often destructive.
Swallows
The swifts had gone from Port Meadow in Oxford, as well, when I was down there, even though there were still chicks to be seen on the webcam. (Funny, that...)
But there were swallows. Looking at swifts, just for the pleasure of it, has somehow trained my fuzzy eyes to be more quick, or my brain to be more confident, at watching other bird shapes flying. Swallows have something of the same habit as my dark gothic loves, but are so different, too. How could I ever have confused the two? Swallows with those curves, those contrasts of light and dark. Their little tweeting sounds are quite distinctive, too – they’re beginning to stand out from the background of unidentified bird sounds and be a signal that grabs my ears and turns my eyes to the sky.
They are also, now I happen to notice it, very, very cute…
