Swifts and Us: The Life of the Bird that Sleeps in the Sky

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Cracks, gaps and crevices which for thousands of years have offered nesting space in buildings, are being closed off, while new housing rarely offers entry holes for nesting birds. A 1950s setting and a main character who is a man with missing fingers/arm in Cloudstreet by Tim Winton and The Young Accomplice by Benjamin Wood. This book is a fantastic read even if it is at times depressing, though more in a nostalgic melancholy way. This republication has been made possible by the National Lottery Heritage Fund, as part of the Oxford Swift City project. The characters are adorable—I usually have a firm favorite, but I couldn’t pick one here because everyone in the ensemble is delightful—and the mystery kept me on the edge of my seat until the end.

Until 1943, when hunters in a Peruvian rainforest flushed out 13 ringed birds from a hollow tree, observers north and south of the equator had no idea where swifts went for half of the year, and we’re still not much the wiser.The current push to help swifts is requiring that nest blocks or boxes be incorporated in every new home design. When she isn't writing, Beth is woodcarving, or making a mess of her flat, or talking the nearest ear off about unexplained occurrences.

As a fun bonus, I learned some new words with this book, but I barely noticed it because I learned them through meeting a family of lovable weirdos; that’s way more fun than a vocabulary lesson. The first thing was seeing their aerial displays as they rush around, screeching like banshees, feeding on hatching insects over open water (while I was fishing). A single detective is fun, but a group of detectives with complementary skills and driving interpersonal dynamics? Follow the swifts on their incredible journey north, from the jungles of Africa to their nesting site in Europe. Skylarks with Rosie by Stephen Moss: Devoting a chapter each to the first 13 weeks of the initial UK lockdown, Moss traces the season’s development in Somerset alongside his family’s experiences and what was emerging on the national news.Although she has to lie down to garden, “to put my hands in the earth to dig is life giving … it is almost as if the earth were nourishing me at the moment. The swifts come screeching down our new street and we saw one investigating a crevice in our back roof for a nest! Told as a series of reflections that fly through his mind in the course of a single day watching swifts from his garden in Norfolk, he ranges across topics as widely as a swift ranges across the sky.

Much of the book is devoted to the author's travels visiting swift nesting areas throughout Europe and Britain. The insects caught are large in variety, including thrips, flies, aphids, beetles, spiders, moths and mayflies. She lives in Newcastle upon Tyne with her partner and hopefully, by the time you are reading this, a dog. These cookies help provide information on metrics the number of visitors, bounce rate, traffic source, etc. Now, thanks to a recent Swedish study, we know that in the non-breeding season, many birds spend 99% of their time flying, eating and sleeping on the wing, and some never land at all.But stories that make you angry notwithstanding, if you love birds and especially Swifts then you will love this book. This is admittedly a murder mystery, and it’s possible that I’m just out of the loop, but there was a bit more, well, murder than I expected. Swift Awareness Week 2021 (3-11 July) has over 60 local events around the UK starting this Saturday so please do support any that are near you. Other chapters see her travelling to Italy, Switzerland and Ireland, the furthest west that swifts breed. The Stubborn Light of Things by Melissa Harrison: A collection of five and a half years’ worth of Harrison’s monthly Nature Notebook columns for The Times.

This gives the reader a starting point with which to quickly understand the individual Swifts… or not.A lovely book, a gift from someone who knows how much I love these screaming, bug-munching, itinerant sky-knives. but as we grow to know the family better, we realize that ‘Erf’ is Erf’s name and, as Erf chose it themself, it tells us more about them than a Dictionary-selected one might. This storyline combines well with Shenanigan’s desire to know if she’s predestined to be a risk-taker and mischief-maker. I discovered Teale a few years ago through the exceptional Autumn Across America, the first volume of a quartet illuminating the nature of the four seasons in the USA; he won a Pulitzer for the final book. The lines between help and hindrance are too blurry, the background of human interference too bleak.