At this time of the year, bird-watchers will begin to feel a keen sense of anticipation as they await the first sign of migrant birds returning to our skies. Particularly fascinating are the swifts, those black birds with sickle-shaped wings who swoop and swerve above our heads, their distinctive cries alerting us to their presence as we vainly try to spot them rapidly receding in pursuit of some hapless aphid.
For us in Cornwall swifts arrive to breed in late April and depart after too short a spell in early August. The rest of their year is spent almost entirely on the wing, sleeping and eating as they soar across the equatorial forests and plains of Africa. If you’re lucky enough to live near a swift colony the screaming parties of swifts in mid-summer are one of the highlights of the natural year.
Swifts have long been a subject of interest for the intellectually curious. Where did they go when they left us in August? The dramatic and mysterious annual disappearance of swifts and other migrants intrigued the late seventeenth century scientist Charles Morton. As part of the fashionable interest of the time in the possibility of life on the moon, Morton speculated that the birds must have left this planet entirely. He calculated that it would have taken them eight weeks to fly to the moon.
Only recently, with the aid of lightweight geo-positioning technology, has it been definitively proven that the common swift seen in Britain spends the rest of its year in Africa, making its way back to us via the west coast of Africa and across the western Mediterranean in March and April as it heads unerringly for its birthplace in Europe.
Charles Morton was Cornish, born in 1627 at Pendavey, near Wadebridge. While occasionally cited for what he called his ‘lighter’ reflections on the moon, he is justly famed for his work educating dissenters in the late 1600s. A man with moderate presbyterian views, Charles Morton had returned to Cornwall and become rector of Blisland in 1654, soon after graduating from Oxford University. However, as one of those who rejected the need for bishops, he was ejected from his living on the restoration of the monarchy in 1660.
Charles then spent six years living and preaching at St Ive on the other side of Bodmin Moor, before leaving for London in 1666, where some properties he owned had been badly damaged in the Great Fire of that year. Once settled, he established an academy for the sons of dissenters, one of his pupils being Daniel Defoe. Its syllabus was very advanced for its day but he was forced to close in 1685 when, after some harassment from the authorities, he was arrested, suspected of being dangerously ‘republican’. Charles then left for the freer air of New England in 1686, becoming pastor at Charlestown Church, Massachusetts, while occasionally lecturing at the nearby Harvard College, where he advocated a moralistic and ‘cheerful’ Christianity until his death in 1698.
Meanwhile, the swifts now have to cope with warnings concerning their very future as we lay waste to their habitats and wage war on their food source through our undeclared and little understood war on insects. They must dearly wish that they could adopt Charles Morton’s suggestion and head for the moon.
Cornish studies resources 