A Single Swallow (5 page)

Wilbur Smith likes guns as much as the next man. He never misses an opportunity to reel off a full specification, including precise ammunition details. The impact of bullets on targets is recorded with a kind of moral faithfulness. He seems to see his role as a popular historian, with a mission to entertain. The struggles of black and white, English, Afrikaner and Zulu, from the First World War to the present form the backdrop to his blockbusters. He is anti-communist, sceptical of imperialists, and the heroes in his stories are always those who most love Africa. The continent itself is perhaps the true hero of his tales, embodied, generally, by some proud and fierce white South African with rippling muscles and a short temper. It is extremely rare to find a Wilbur Smith heroine whose buttocks do not remind their creator of ostrich eggs.

I woke to a call from reception, scrambled up and went down. Standing outside the hotel was Rick Nuttall, confined to the street by a locked gate which could only be opened from reception, Hobbit guests and their cars being spectacularly well defended. I recognised the large, handsome man by his friendly smile and his swallow T-shirt.

Rick is the director of the National Museum in Bloemfontein, and one of Africa's foremost authorities on Barn Swallows, though he would be too modest to make that claim: he talked reverently of Anders Moller in Denmark, perhaps the world's greatest expert.

We drove around town for a while, getting me my bearings and unravelling something of Rick's life and times. From a hill on the edge of town Rick showed me where north, south, east and west were, and we watched weather systems over the veldt. The light lay gold and blue and green on the grasslands, and, to the south-east, rain-black under a storm.

‘I love birdwatching out there,' Rick said. ‘Just going quietly, and stopping and staring.'

Rick speaks in that lovely, easy, irresistible-to-imitate South African accent beloved of British impressionists. You can hear his English heritage in it, his South African soul and the way he thinks. In my British ears African voices change English from water into wine.

The air was full of birds which Rick began to name: Pearl-Breasted Swallows, which shine like crescent moons (their dark, dark blue teaches you to see their fiery white); Greater Striped Swallows, which have longer tails and rufous speckled chests; Little Swifts, and many other flying creatures.

‘It's like being born again,' I said. ‘I know them all in Britain, pretty well, but here . . .'

I fell in love with birds at the age of seven or so: crows, ravens and buzzards were my first subjects. I began a list then, which all birdwatchers have somewhere, of all the species I could identify. By the age of fourteen the list was up in the hundreds, and I had seen my first rarities, like the Water Rail, a wonderfully retiring marsh bird, and Red Kites, which in those days could only be found in the very middle
of Wales. Bird-watching abroad, on holidays to France or Italy, was always a disorientating business. Seeing most of the birds of Britain was one thing – something finite, which you could work towards – but on the continent you had to start again. And without knowing the culture of these new bird worlds, you could not really tell how excited you should be: Bee-Eaters and Rollers and Hoopoes seemed amazingly exotic and seductive, when I saw them in the Midi, but were they rare? Avocets were very special in Britain, but in the Camargue they were as common as magpies.

We went to Rick's university, pausing between students playing cricket and a reed bed to watch Red Bishops, fat little birds like shots of pure crimson. We sat on a terrace, moving under cover as the storm we had seen brushed the edge of Bloemfontein, and I filled the back of my notebook with Rick's expertise.

‘We can track where they have been feeding by trace elements in their feathers, like iron, aluminium and calcium. The proportions present in a given area are found in the plants, and then in the insects, and then in the swallows. It's a wonderful thing because it is so unintrusive: you just need a tiny section of one pin' (‘pin' from pinion, meaning feather).

The process is in its infancy because so little of the earth has been chemically analysed in this way, but there was a thrilled expansion in Rick's gestures as he described the possibility of actually mapping the journeys of a single swallow, and therefore those of thousands of swallows. Flipping open a laptop he displayed a hoard of data, an immaculately tabulated treasure, three years of results from his swallow-ringing project.

There were nationalities beyond nationality – Bloemfontein birds had been found everywhere from Cork to Transylvania, and then they had come back, and gone again, flying at speeds we can only estimate.

‘Twenty-seven days!' Rick pointed at one line of a spread-sheet, ‘Incredible isn't it? And that's assuming she was ringed the day she left and caught here the day she arrived.'

We marvelled at ages – first-year, third-year, sixth-year – distances, and death rates.

‘Seventy per cent,' he said, soberly. ‘In their first two years, 70 per cent mortality.'

I tried to imagine the corpses. Hundreds and hundreds of thousands of them.

‘Oh yes, and it only takes three days of winter here to kill them.'

‘Three days?'

‘Yes, if they stay too long, by the second day of rain they have no energy to hunt, by the third they're in the mud and they can't get up. I get calls every year from farmers – they say “There are swallows everywhere, on the ground, have they been poisoned? What can I do?” The temperature only has to fall a few degrees, with rain, and that's it.'

We drove down to Rick's house, and he showed me around. There was a bit of wilderness, just beyond his garden fence, not too dangerous, not too developed, where he would normally expect to see swallows. No swallows. Here was where his wife and children would be, normally, though today they were having a brei – a barbeque – at his mother-in-law's.

‘It's OK!' he reassured me, smiling quietly, as I worried I was dragging him away.

‘My wife understands how important this is for me . . . talking about swallows, talking to other birdwatchers.'

We called in, briefly, on Rick's mother-in-law. I shook hands with his wife and said hello to their little girl.

‘You're very lucky,' he said, where we stopped next, at a petrol station on a corner, opposite a house surrounded by trees, with swallows painted on the garden wall. ‘There used to be so many of them roosting here that people would come in coaches to see them. Then they abandoned it, and we didn't know where they were, but just a couple of weeks ago I found them . . .'

‘How many?'

‘Impossible to say!' he laughed. ‘About 1.8 million.'

‘What!'

‘Approximately . . .'

Later he said: ‘I was taught by a great man. He said, if you want to
be a good birdwatcher, when you hear a bird, go and find the bird. That way you will know its call.'

‘And how did you get into them in the first place?'

‘I was very young and I just remember looking across the garden at a dark green hedge and there was this beautiful thing, so amazing . . .'

He described a bird I have not seen, which sounded as though it was made of red and gold and green and white, the name of which I tried to remember, and on which he gently corrected me: a Double-Collared Sunbird.

We drove to a place near a river, with tall, tall blue gum trees. It was a brooding evening of towering clouds. The light faded as gently as falling leaves.

‘Lesser Kestrels!' he said.

They came home in flocks, from very high up and far away, dropped down as though stooping on prey and settled themselves, sweetly, in barred ranks, like sheaves of little darts.

‘I really must do this more often,' Rick murmured, as if reminding himself of something one cannot forget. I think he meant standing alone, with no thought for anything but the present. After a while we jumped quietly back into the bakkie and set off on our next adventure. Rick checked his watch, glanced at the sky, and frowned. Birds had begun to disappear and we had yet to see a single Barn Swallow.

‘We've left it late,' Rick murmured, half to himself, as the bakkie accelerated. And so we were in a race now, as the light spiralled down and Rick spun us with increasing urgency through the suburbs. One moment too late and we would find nothing but a forest of dark reeds, screaming with chatter. Two moments too late and all would be silence. Three moments too late . . . Rick had another worry.

‘It's used as a cut-through by all sorts of people – it's not exactly secure – so when we came ringing here a couple of weeks ago I made some calls and got some security. Just so that we could get on with it without worrying too much. We were very quiet but . . .' He did not look ashamed, just saddened by the truth of this. We were heading down towards a wasteland, the kind you find in any town anywhere,
except here anyone could theoretically kill anyone and the world would have to say you had asked for it.

‘. . . they may have . . . they may have gone down to the other side of the . . .'

Not the security: the swallows. The suburbs were thinning now and I knew we must be close.

‘You just see them,' Rick said. ‘There are a few people, students and colleagues, who would call me at dusk to say “I saw them going this way at this time”, and then I got this sort of hunch and I looked at the map and I saw this place . . . I thought “I wonder . . .”'

We both kept bobbing our heads down to look up. I could not tell if he really thought we were too late.

‘There!' he said.

‘Oh yes! And there!'

As my excitement and disbelief mounted, his began to relax. The conjuror had done it.

‘Another one – and there!'

‘You'll start seeing quite a few,' he said, as I bounced in the passenger seat like a dog in a forest of flying squirrels.

They were coming in from all points of the compass now. It was not possible, it will never be, to know how many ‘nationalities' there were. How quickly the air filled.

What is it like to stand under all those nations, all those experiences, under all those guesses, those eyes? You begin to try to see them all but you cannot see, you can only feel. Then, since guessing is impossible, you begin to know.

You know they have not finished eating. You feel the air devoid of midges. You hear the snap of their bills as they slide sideways, just missing your head, you feel the wind as one goes over your shoulder – snap! A bill shuts like a snicking trap-door. You half-hear, half-feel the hiss of the hunter's wake.

‘When we were ringing we barely got bitten,' Rick grinned.

We had pulled up and stopped and walked a little way, over churned ground and debris. Ahead were the reed beds; water and vegetation covering an area about the size of two twisted rugby
pitches. Behind us were trees, and, scattered round about, the fenced edges of different settlements. The air all around us stormed with silent wings. Sometimes we raised our binoculars. A man trudged by, not seeming to take much notice of the swallows, glancing blankly at us. Perhaps we looked like security.

And though no one killed anyone, all around us there was a mighty harvest of death. No swallow hit any other, of course, though they did not fly like starlings, or geese, or jackdaws, or waders, or any other species you can watch wheeling and whirring in thousands, in tune. Instead they seemed to delight in chaos, charging zig-zag into space which was at once empty and full, as though playing chicken with physics. They filled all the air our eyes could afford them in every conceivable direction. Our words deserted us again.

Chaucer, the poet at the fountainhead of English literature, puts the swallow in a strange place in relation to men and birds. His ‘Parlement of Foules' is a poetic tour around the Garden of Love, with Chaucer as a visitor and the Roman general Scipio Africanus as his guide, at least as far as the gate. It is St Valentine's Day. Scipio pushes the worried poet (protesting he knows nothing of love) into the garden, where he finds all the birds of the world, summoned by Nature to choose their mates. Chaucer's tour of the characters and appetites of different birds is at once caustic, incisive and affectionate. In a broadly feudal, pyramidal food-chain (noble eagles at the top, countless seed-eaters down below) there is a hot, gluttonous cormorant, a ‘waker' (watchful, wakeful) goose and a ‘cukkow ever unkynde'. But among all the ‘foules of ravyne' (ravenous raptors) and the lesser thieves, foes and destroyers of their preys, there is only one murderer.

Chaucer places it between the nightingale, which he credits with calling forth the new green growth of leaves, and the ‘wedded' turtle
dove, ‘with heart so trewe'. Between the bird we prize most for its art and one we idealise for its faith, in a couplet which encapsulates a cycle of life and death, is the swallow, living by the murder of littler things which here are positively angelic, doing no harm more than making honey from fresh flowers. It seems a dreadfully human predicament.

Now the birds were black flecks against dark twilight, white sparks against black-green reeds, dull red blood-spots shooting close by us, as if they were eating the light.

‘Far side!' Rick said. He kept helping me direct my binoculars. It was dizzying looking over there, across the dulled water to the reeds opposite. Biblical plagues of the birds, denser than locusts, thicker than blood-spatter, making a sound we could barely hear but clearly see: a hissing, darting, scything thing, a terror. And then they began to come down. Entire dark whirlwinds, funnelling down into reeds. Was it fear, or thrill, or blind hive-mindedness that made them unscrew themselves from the sky like that, so hectically?

‘There was an Eagle Owl that used to come,' Rick had said, at the abandoned roost. ‘It used to just charge in and out of the flocks until it wasn't hungry.'