However, they do find common ground through their japes with Ned, a free spirit Frances meets during her brief time as a taxi driver, and Frances starts to imagine how her life could be different. Especially with the heat waves that have swept Europe this summer, I’m much happier reading about France or Italy than being there. Common swifts are now red-listed and at risk of local extinction in Britain, owing to modern house-building techniques that deprive them of nesting sites, and indiscriminate use of pesticides. The book beautifully captures the themes of leaving home in pursuit of safety, friendship, and adventure. This makes it easy to keep the many characters straight but it also leads to some interesting exploration as the characters investigate the power of the names that came from the Dictionary.

The three and a half months they were with us passed in what felt like an instant, leaving us bereft until they come back. It doesn’t have much in common with The Swifts beyond being a little on the older side of young readers, but it’s still a very excellent book. Evolved to nest in cliffs and trees, they now live alongside humans except in rare places like Abernethy Forest near Inverness in Scotland, where they still nest in trees, in holes abandoned by woodpeckers. His list of birds in the area is impressive, including some you’d be lucky to come across in the UK – turtledove, nightingale, stone curlew.

It didn’t bode well when, on page three, Gibson explained that her swift spotting group always went home when the bats appeared as the emergence of the bats is ‘a cross over point after which you seldom see a swift’. The book is written by a fellow amateur enthusiast who does whatever she can to help conserve this amazing species. His lifestyle is also a deliberate resistance to hyper-speed modernity: he scythes his grass, spends days preserving a haul of walnuts, and tries his hand at pressing oil and making spirits. And that is the hard thing about this book, and about the many other books being written about wildlife in the 21st century. Seed to Dust by Marc Hamer: Hamer paints a loving picture of his final year at the 12-acre British garden he tended for decades.

There is also gentle mockery of the French with their bureaucracy and obsession with hunting, and self-deprecation of his own struggle to get his point across in a second language. With his literary allusions, Cocker is aiming for something like Tim Dee’s exceptional Greenery but falls short. overall, it was encouraging to see the efforts people are putting in around the world to assist the survival of these birds from switzerland, to my village outside of cambridge to northern ireland! That being said… I’m sure there are kids out there who want scarier stuff (again, The Swifts is not scary; it just has a few murders in it). Narratively, none of these family pairings are seen as lesser than a quote-unquote traditional one; a few of the extended Family challenge Cook’s position, but their attitude is very much checked and rejected by the core unit.Although apparently popular with many audiences, given how many nature books contain these stories, I don’t connect with stories of close human interaction with wildlife. I have a TBR a mile long and young readers aren’t my priority anymore, so it takes a lot to push one to the top of the list. After millions of years of evolution, swifts’ arrival and departure in the UK has become noticeably earlier recently.

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. First published in 1956, Swifts in a Tower still offers readers astonishing insights into the private lives of swifts, their lifestyle and wider issues. Other chapters see her travelling to Italy, Switzerland and Ireland, the furthest west that swifts breed.

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.

An early ancestor of the swifts and the hummingbirds, the 52 million year old Eocypselus rowei, shows the strong upper wing bone that allows the flight characteristics of each. What does she do that is in character for her name, and what does she do that is out of character for the name?

In an explanatory note, he says: “This is not strictly a book of science but the hybrid form that is conventionally associated with the term ‘nature writing’. Within this framework he delivers a lot of information about the world’s swift species, a fair bit of it familiar to me from those previous books; more novel are his stories of remarkable sightings, like a vagrant white-throated needletail in the Outer Hebrides (it later died in a collision with a wind turbine). This gives the reader a starting point with which to quickly understand the individual Swifts… or not. Thanks to this book and efforts of other like-minded swifting people, a few more hearts and minds may be opened to the wonder of these birds, a few more swift boxes put up and more voices may well speak up for nature. I saw it on shelf at the library and knew now was the perfect time to read My Life in Houses by Margaret Forster, a memoir via the places she’s lived, starting with the house where she was born in 1938, on a council estate in Carlisle.