One Midsummer’s Day by Mark Cocker: Swifts’ flying feats put our opposable thumbs to shame

To say that this is a book about birds would be to show oneself as foolish as that early reviewer who, in these pages, described Seamus Heaney’s Death of a Naturalist as “a lengthy, disappointing description of frogs”. That Mark Cocker is aiming as high as the altitudes reached by the creature he studies is signalled in his subtitle: Swifts and the Story of Life on Earth.

The narrative is constructed around a single day in summer, from one evening to the next, during which the author studies a flock of swifts hunting in the shadowy heights above his garden. Cocker is both a superb prose stylist, with a poet’s eye and ear, and a naturalist of wide erudition and imaginative reach. He embarked on his project fifteen years ago, when he began to make notes on subjects ranging from ‘insect pollination . . . to the physics and chemistry of the Sun’s interior’. He is a polymath in the best sense of the word.

To speak of “the swift” is limiting, for there are about 100 different species of the bird in existence. The one above Cocker’s garden, and the one on which he concentrates, is the Common swift (Apus apus). It is a tiny thing, about 15cm in length. Its most remarkable feature is the span of its wings, “which bend over and around the upperparts and cross at the bird’s rear while extending well beyond the tail end”.

Its silhouette in flight is unmistakable, and in describing it Cocker quotes a beautiful and beautifully accurate couplet from Edward Thomas’s poem Haymaking:

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The swift with wings and tail as sharp and narrow

As if the bow had flown off with the arrow.

Cocker illustrates the disproportion between the swift’s relatively enormous wings and its minuscule body by comparing it with the albatross, which has a wingspan of 3.6m. If it had the same ratio of weight to wing-length as the swift, “it would need an additional 74.4 metres of wing”.

This is only one among a great many mind-boggling facts about the bird that Cocker will reveal. Another is the distances it flies, and the strength of endurance it displays. “Swifts are birds of near-perpetual motion,” he writes, “each a kind of journey incarnate.” They cover some 800 air-metres in a day, and in their annual migrations, “from Ballyshannon to Beijing” and back, they travel 26,000km.

They also ascend to extraordinary heights. Over ordinary ground they have been sighted at 4,400m, and sometimes collide with aircraft; above the Himalayas, “common swifts routinely feed up to 5,730m”.

One of the eeriest and most entrancing of the bird’s behavioural patterns is the dawn and twilight ascensions they perform, sometimes to as much as four kilometres above the Earth. The phenomenon was first registered by a French reconnaissance pilot in the first World War. Flying at 4,400 metres, he saw, Cocker tells us, “a flock of near-stationary birds seemingly asleep and drifting above the clouds”.

A tracking device attached to a particular bird showed that it did not take a single break in its 10-month flying cycle from Sweden to Africa and back

Can it be that a bird could fly and at the same time sleep? It can. Recent research has found that in the air, at immense heights, swifts can be on the wing for months, flying and sleeping and never once coming to land. A tracking device attached to a particular bird showed that it did not take a single break in its 10-month flying cycle from Sweden to Africa and back. And we boast of our opposable thumb.

Cocker’s own range is seemingly limitless. Take, for instance, his knowledge of, and enthusiasm for, bacteria, 10 trillion of which could be contained in a spoonful of soil. These supposedly humble life forms inspire some of Crocker’s most impressive passages. Take this, for example: “Nothing so far within the human compass could possibly end the inexorable destiny of bacterial life. Our status on Earth is as the dust in their path and if there is a god then she is probably unicellular.”

One Midsummer’s Day is a wonderful book – literally, a book of wonders. Cocker is a firmly grounded visionary. Our aim should be, he writes, an “imaginative wholeness”, necessary for us “to live correctly and truly” and to bear witness to the beauty and fragility of the world. As the poet Rilke has it, we must live to the full

because being here is much, and because all this

that’s here, so fleeting, seems to require us and strangely

concerns us. Us the most fleeting of all.

Or as Cocker urges, look up, for “this is our home. It is the version of life to which we are most wonderfully, miraculously adapted. Breathe in and you’ll see.”