Our swifts are leaving already.

They arrived in the last week of April and early May, foraging over the reserve for flying insects, and they have stayed only long enough to breed.

For a while, gangs of immature birds practise high speed flying around the houses, shrieking at the top of their voices all the while, and then they are off on an autumn migration that is probably triggered by falling flying-insect populations as the summer ends. By September there will be very few swifts left in Trowbridge.