by Rosemary McKinnon
A few summers ago, I had an unusual set of visitors to my bedroom. This bedroom has a fireplace, rarely used, with a chimney. Swifts arrived to nest there. Accustomed to silence, I was not aware of their presence until the chicks hatched. From then on, for weeks, I could barely sleep. I was awoken constantly by incessant screams for food. Eventually it was time for the fledglings to leave their nest. For reasons that were not clear, they could not fly up the chimney and, instead, dropped into my fireplace. Fortunately I was there to help. Of the six fledglings, three were dead on arrival but I was able to rescue the remaining three and toss them into the air where they took flight and had a chance to survive.
Swifts almost never land. They eat, sleep and court on the wing. And they fly thousands of miles across the sea from Africa where they spend the winter to raise their babies in our northern climates.
I was reminded of this experience when reading Hannah Bourne-Taylor’s book, The Fledgling (2022) which tells the story of her move to Ghana with her newly married husband. She felt displaced and heartsick in this foreign land, until she connected with the natural world through several intense encounters. The first arrived in the form of a baby swift, which she rescued and nurtured round the clock till it could take to the skies. A second encounter was with a very different bird – a Bronze Mannikin finch which she cared for, until 84 days later, when it too, was ready to leave her and regain its family flock. This book is a love-story to a bird, which made its home on Hannah’s body, nesting in her long hair, and . . . it is, of course, also an ode to all living things.
Hannah Bourne-Taylor has not only written a moving story about one woman’s intimate encounter with the wild in West Africa, but she has gone on to become a champion for available nesting sites for wild birds in England. She dramatized her concern by decorating her nearly naked body with birds and feathers and walked through the streets of London to give voice to the “Feather Speech” campaign, which urges us all to remember that we share our home with other kind, and to make our newer houses more hospitable to cavity-nesting birds by using bricks with holes to accommodate these birds. I recommend that you watch her speech online at, https://hannahbournetaylor.com/news. And also that you read this eloquent story about one woman giving voice to the time and energy investment needed to raise a wild bird. These efforts were rewarded by a renewed sense of identity and belonging, which led to the alleviation of her depression and feeling of displacement.