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To reach them, they fly straight at the entrance holes and enter seemingly at full tilt. Swifts nest in obscure places, in dark and cramped spaces: hollows beneath roof tiles, behind the intakes for ventilation shafts, in the towers of churches. My own private vespers felt a little like counting the steps up a flight of steep stairs. Sleeping was like losing time, somehow like not being alive, and drifting into it at night there sometimes came a panic that I might not find my way back from wherever I had gone. Listing them one by one built imaginative sanctuary between walls of unknowing knowns. No matter how tightly the day’s bad things had gripped me, there was so much up there above me, so much below, so many places and states that were implacable, unreachable, entirely uninterested in human affairs. It had something of the power of incantation, but it did not seem a compulsion, and it was not a prayer. This evening ritual wasn’t a test of how much I could keep in my mind at once, or of how far I could send my imagination. If you record swifts’ high-pitched, insistent screaming and slow it down to human speed, you can hear what their voices sound like as they speak to one another: a wild, bubbling, rising and falling call, something like the song of common loons.
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Its eyes seemed unable to focus on me, as if it were an entity from an alternate universe whose senses couldn’t quite map onto our phenomenal world. Its frame was tough and spare, and its feathers were bleached by the sun. You know those deep-sea fish dragged by nets from fathoms of blackness, how obvious it is that they aren’t supposed to exist where we are? The adult swift was like that in reverse. I’ve seen them up close now, held a live grounded adult in my hands before letting it fall back into the sky. They still seem to me the closest things to aliens on Earth. Swifts weigh about 1½ ounces, and their surfing and tacking against the pressures of oncoming air make visible the movings of the atmosphere. Even so, watching them with the naked eye was rewarding in how it revealed the dynamism of what before was merely blankness. There was no way to tell one bird from another, nor to watch them do anything other than move from place to place, although sometimes, if the swifts were flying low over rooftops, I’d see one open its mouth, and that was truly uncanny, because the gape was huge, turning the bird into something uncomfortably like a miniature basking shark. They were only ever flickering silhouettes at 30, 40, 50 miles an hour, a shoal of birds, a pouring sheaf of identical black grains against bright clouds. They were so fast that it was impossible to focus on their facial expressions or watch them preen through binoculars. When I was young, I was frustrated that there was no way for me to know them better. Unlike all other birds I knew as a child, they never descended to the ground. But to me, they are creatures of the upper air, and of their nature unintelligible, which makes them more akin to angels. Once they were called the “Devil’s bird,” perhaps because those screaming flocks of black crosses around churches seemed pulled from darkness, not light. Swifts are magical in the manner of all things that exist just a little beyond understanding. I went to the freezer, took out the swift and buried it in the garden one hand’s-width deep in earth newly warmed by the sun.
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It was in early May the next year, as soon as I saw the first returning swifts flowing down from the clouds, that I knew what I had to do. I didn’t want to leave it there, so I took it home, swaddled it in a towel and tucked it in the freezer. The bird was suffused with a kind of seriousness very akin to holiness.
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But I knew, looking at the swift, that I could not do anything like that to it. I cleaned and polished fox skulls disarticulated, dried and kept the wings of roadkill birds. Encouraged by books, I’d always been the type of Gothic amateur naturalist who preserved interesting bits of the dead. I picked it up, held it in my palm, saw the dust in its feathers, its wings crossed like dull blades, its eyes tightly closed, and realized that I didn’t know what to do. I found a dead common swift once, a husk of a bird under a bridge over the River Thames, where sunlight from the water cast bright scribbles on the arches above.