Summer’s here – the swifts are back. That’s my marker. I haven’t seen as many this year, but they’re here, seven or eight screaming madcap circles round the house. I care more about birds as I get older. We’re lucky to live near a park with a copse of scrub and willows at the back of the house. Long-tailed tits scatter through the trees and blackbirds swap arias from the hawthorn trees. I’ve been using the incredible Merlin app to brush up on bird calls, and now stand happily in the garden just to hear them sing, trying to tell a wren from a willow warbler. A week or so ago I stood in the dusk and listened to a single thrush churning through lunatic combinations of calls. It sang with such urgency and power I believed that single bird was holding back the night.

Red in tooth and claw: yesterday a sparrowhawk all but brushed my head in pursuit of a blue tit, which tried and failed to hide in the hedge and was plucked out by the razors of talon and beak and gone, gone, hung dead from one claw as the raptor beat away with lazy power. There’s always a luminous silence after the sparrowhawk. It takes the birds a while to make themselves known again. This afternoon we’ve watched a single blue tit scavenging through the woodshed for spiders and bugs, stitching a loop between food and nest. I think this is a solo parent now. I wish him or her well with a Sisyphean task.

Even now I can hear the swifts around the house, most often gone by the time I reach the door to look. They could as well carry me with them. As always, someone else has phrased these things better than I ever could; friend Ali recently sent me this poem by Ted Hughes. It’s a cracker. His language so perfectly evokes that scattergun headlong chaos that swifts bring to summers.

Swifts by Ted Hughes

Fifteenth of May. Cherry blossom. The swifts
Materialize at the tip of a long scream
Of needle. ‘Look! They’re back! Look!’ And they’re gone
On a steep

Controlled scream of skid
Round the house-end and away under the cherries. Gone.
Suddenly flickering in sky summit, three or four together,
Gnat-whisp frail, and hover-searching, and listening

For air-chills – are they too early? With a bowing
Power-thrust to left, then to right, then a flicker they
Tilt into a slide, a tremble for balance,
Then a lashing down disappearance

Behind elms.
They’ve made it again,
Which means the globe’s still working, the Creation’s
Still waking refreshed, our summer’s
Still all to come —
And here they are, here they are again
Erupting across yard stones
Shrapnel-scatter terror. Frog-gapers,
Speedway goggles, international mobsters —

A bolas of three or four wire screams
Jockeying across each other
On their switchback wheel of death.
They swat past, hard-fletched

Veer on the hard air, toss up over the roof,
And are gone again. Their mole-dark labouring,
Their lunatic limber scramming frenzy
And their whirling blades

Sparkle out into blue —
Not ours any more.
Rats ransacked their nests so now they shun us.
Round luckier houses now
They crowd their evening dirt-track meetings,

Racing their discords, screaming as if speed-burned,
Head-height, clipping the doorway
With their leaden velocity and their butterfly lightness,
Their too much power, their arrow-thwack into the eaves.

Every year a first-fling, nearly flying
Misfit flopped in our yard,
Groggily somersaulting to get airborne.
He bat-crawled on his tiny useless feet, tangling his flails

Like a broken toy, and shrieking thinly
Till I tossed him up — then suddenly he flowed away under
His bowed shoulders of enormous swimming power,
Slid away along levels wobbling

On the fine wire they have reduced life to,
And crashed among the raspberries.
Then followed fiery hospital hours
In a kitchen. The moustached goblin savage

Nested in a scarf. The bright blank
Blind, like an angel, to my meat-crumbs and flies.
Then eyelids resting. Wasted clingers curled.
The inevitable balsa death.
Finally burial
For the husk
Of my little Apollo —

The charred scream
Folded in its huge power.