Sicily, swifts and swallows
Awe-inspiring birds and some book recommendations
The Dance Floor is a newsletter about moving, but annoyingly I’ve not been moving much this week. This was partly due to being on holiday in Sicily, but mainly due to horrible lower-back pain, an unwelcome new entrant in my life. I’ve not suffered from back pain before, and it’s surprisingly limiting effects have knocked me a little bit sideways. I realised how much of my life revolves around the ability to move and move well; currently devoid of that capability, I’m now realising I’ll have to recalibrate what that means given that I’m struggling to tie my shoelaces. Am sure there’s a post to be written about how to cope with not being able to move well. Indeed, if any of you lovely readers have tips I’d love to hear them (me and my wonky sacro-iliac joint will be very grateful). However, today is not the day for a post about not moving.
Today, I want to write about swifts and swallows. Swifts and swallows and Sicily. About abundance and aliveness, and how these birds took my breath away.
Swifts and swallows know how to move. They travel at speeds of up to 69mph. Nature’s friendly fighter pilots, they do everything on the wing and seem to play, eat, and even mate in the sky (we didn’t see them mating in the sky, but they do). In Sicily, we saw them swirling around the castles at the top of Erice, riding on thermals and necking insects on the lower slopes of Mount Etna, and perhaps most spectacularly, hundreds of them whipping in continuous invisible circles close to our faces around the enchanting cavernous entrance to the Riserva Naturale Dello Zingaro. We stayed with them for an hour each time, revelling in their mastery of the air, marvelling at the swiiiffttt’ sounds as they whooshed round our ears.
I have been moderately obsessed with swifts for a while now, especially since reading Hannah Bourne-Taylor’s incredible first novel Fledgling and then learning about her love and drive to protect these birds.
Fledgling is a stunning, raw and heart-rending tale of Bourne-Taylor’s relationship with a finch that she nurses back to health, and a meditation on the human/nature connection. Without saying it explicitly, Fledging shows that the line between human and nature is artificial - we are part of nature too. This book gave me deep comfort at a time when I was becoming increasingly sad about biodiversity and habitat loss and feeling powerless to do anything about it. Alongside her writing, Bourne-Taylor is fighting for swifts and encouraging developers to use swift bricks in new developments, as standard, to increase habitats for these incredible birds. Seeing wild spaces constantly be demolished to make way for more housing is heartbreaking. Yet watching swifts in Sicily instilled a renewed sense of wonder, awe, and hope. These birds keep going. People like Hannah Bourne-Taylor give me hope too. I am deeply grateful to them.
Swallows were another abundant element of our Sicily jaunt. My partner is a swallow obsessive. He loves the shape of their tails and the way they seem to tandem fly together, like twins in a formation team. I wonder if he also sees synergies with kitesurfing, which is what he used to do for a living as a professional athlete and is now on the media side. Kiting is perhaps one of the only ways we humans might truly understand flight, working with the elements to propel movement, shapes, tricks and transit. When I look at swallows and swifts and their patterns through the sky, I see parallels with how he moves under the kite. Both man and bird dancing with the wind. I can see how understanding the wind like he does, and knowing how to move with it, creates that sense of oneness, of connection and being. His love of birds is one of the things I love about him, and the synergy of all of these winged parallels conjures a magical, glowy, alive feeling in me; how incredible it can be when humans choose to learn from and work with nature, rather than disregard it.
In another lovely parallel, I chose Sarah Winman’s Still Life as my holiday read. Still Life is a joy-filled novel, life affirming, and raucous. I wanted to be friends with all it’s characters and am missing them now it’s finished. I’d picked it based on the fact that it was set in Italy, and mentioned E.M.Forster (I relate to the awkwardness written in to a number of his characters). Little did I know that it would also contain art, food, and Florence. And birds too. Along with an Amazonian blue parrot called Claude, swallows and swifts feature highly; symbolic of seasons of change and the cycling of time. They leave Florence and return the next year. And leave and return again. They subtly mark both the passage of time, and it’s reliability. Life’s constancy and mutability. Stillness and liveliness. Still Life. What a clever title for a book, hey? Props to Sarah Winman for that one.
As I contemplate my period of back rehab, I shall try and remember that life is but a cycle of moving and not moving, stillness and flight. It is for now, my time to rest. Rest and marvel at the birds in the sky, and the incredible people who are fighting for them.
Links to support nature
Swifts are becoming increasingly endangered with numbers rapidly declining. The links below include ways to learn more and show support for nature.
Restore Nature Now: I want to be more involved in the fight to save nature and will be at the Restore Nature Now march in London on the 22 June. If you’re keen to join me, find all the details here and pledge your support here.
Find out more about swifts here and swallows here.
Swifts and Us: The life of the bird that sleeps in the sky is a beautiful book written by conservationist Sarah Gibson. If you’d like to learn more about swifts, this a great place to start.
Springwatch is back on BBC for 2024. I love Springwatch as it reminds me of growing up watching the Really Wild Show with Michaela Strachan and Chris Packham. Lots of incredible footage and tips on how to support biodiversity wherever you are.
And lastly, my Sicilian gallery:
Hope the colours brighten up your day wherever you are. Thanks for reading. Lara xx
