It doesn’t look bad, considering it’s been dead for 50 million years. “It”, of course, is a fossil. Specifically, the remains of a bird called Eocypselus rowei, from the Green River Formation in Wyoming. It’s a good fossil, clearly recognisable as a bird, with head, tangled skeleton, spindly legs and the blurred wing outline all clearly visible.
I think of it often. Because Eocypselus rowei is the most recent common ancestor of hummingbirds and swifts. And that makes it something special. Thought of it is summoned by the bird that has just flashed in and out of my sight, so fleeting I immediately question whether I saw it at all. Brushing my teeth, idly scanning the grey rectangle of sky through the dormer window, wondering when I’d see my first swift of the year – and there it was, as if conjured by the thought.
It’s not healthy being a swift‑lover. It’s the stress (will they make it back?); it’s the neck muscles, twisted and knotted from excess scanning of the skies; it’s the danger I bring to myself and my fellow West Norwoodians. Cause of death? Swifts. Or, more accurately, run over by a bus while looking for swifts.
Things don’t get any safer when they’re here. I lean out of my office window on the first floor to watch them execute the avian parkour that gives them their German name: “Mauersegler” – wall sailor. I risk blindness looking into the sun to catch a glimpse of their dark silhouettes. And in more recent years I’ve courted danger by lecturing the unconverted on the peril they face – their plummeting population not just an enduring anguish, but a warning to us all. Unpredictable and extreme weather conditions on their migratory routes can’t be helping.
Imagine a summer without their trademark squee, without the sight of them in the skies, the embodiment of flight. Unthinkable.
Even people with no interest in birds might make an exception for swifts. For earthbound humans, their magic captures the imagination. The air is their medium, as a fish’s is water and an Englishman’s is mild embarrassment. And that magic is compounded not just by their connection with hummingbirds – none of those in SE27, more’s the pity – but with that link, however slender, to the impossibly distant past, and a bird that flew in the skies of the early Eocene.
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