Market town folk looking skywards and wondering what's happening to the swifts

Probably 99 per cent of Northern Echo readers have never been there, which seems rather remiss. It’s a charming spot, tall Georgian houses set squarely around a huge market place, lovely walks by the river.

Of late, however, Masham folk have been looking skywards and sighing: what’s happening to the swifts?

For centuries the town has welcomed their annual arrival from South Africa – “the sound track of a summer evening,” says one of the websites – and no matter what it supposes in Ecclesiastes about the race not being to the swift (or, for that matter, the strong.)

Masham talks affectionately of their dash, their sweep and their swirl, of their distinctive shrieking call, of a market place that makes a perfect circuit for their high speed circling.

Now, however, the swifts appear to be taking wing elsewhere. In the UK, it’s said, numbers have dropped by 50 per cent in the last 20 years, half of that in the last five. The RSPB warns of “amber” endangered status.

In Masham alone, there were hundreds of pairs. Now there may be 20 or 30.

“People who were born in the town talk of the sky being full of them, the graph is falling steeply,” says Carla McCowen, who leads a Save Our Swifts group determined to reverse the trend.

“They’re very special birds and very ancient,” says Mrs McCowen. “A fossil was found in Germany that was 49 million years old and looked just like a modern swift.”

Formed last November the group has held public meetings, made nesting boxes, in June held a Swifts Awareness Week with swift T-shirts, swift biscuits, swift action.

Most ingeniously of all there’s a trail of ten swift sculptures around the town, launched in 2015 as a legacy fund from Masham Arts Festival.

It’s a brilliant idea. For the swifts, and for those who seek them, things may be looking up.

IN days of yore, as well they might say in Masham, there was a kids’ comic called Swift, priced fourpence when it took off and fourpence ha’penny after inflation.

It was founded in 1954 by the Rev Marcus Morris – one of a group of four publications with Robin, Eagle and Girl – said to be part of a crusade to provide “high quality and morally uplifting” comics and aimed at “good and decent” children.

We read it in Shildon, too.

The colourful front cover was long occupied by Tarna the Jungle Boy, whose sidekick was a chimpanzee called Toto. Inside might be everything from King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table to the Swiss Family Robinson, from Sir Boldasbrass to Dial U For Useless.

There was also a strip called The Rolling Stones, but that was about a circus family. Whether Mick and friends were morally uplifted has never been recorded.

After 450 issues, Swift merged with Eagle in 1963. Marcus Morris became managing director of the National Magazine Company, launched the British issue of Cosmopolitan, did other things which need not concern us, was appointed OBE and died, aged 73, in 1989.

SO we take ourselves off on a sort of avian I-spy expedition to Masham, an exercise to which the column is (of course) eminently, optically unsuited.

Happily the lady of the house is faithfully in attendance, if not Toto to my Tarna then a flighted, sighted Jane to a terra firma Tarzan.

I do manage to spot a rather fetching scarecrow, but scarecrows these days are old hat.

It’s Friday evening, the town delightful in the summer sunshine. A disoriented seagull seeks not oysters but ice cream, notices outside Johnny Baghdad’s Café appeal for firefighters, cricketers and good neighbours.

Times change. Houses are called The Old Bank – there’ll soon be two old banks, Barclays closes in September – The Old Library and The Old (the very old) Police Station. A small cottage is called The Nutshell.

The ten swift sculptures, the work of four or five different artists, are scattered around a gentle perambulation of the town. A trail guide is available from the community office in the Little Market Place.

A lone bird – a swift, says the lady of the house – watches unconcerned from an overhead wire. Masham has more overhead wires than Bertram Mills’ circus. We essay its photograph then adjourn for a drink – a swift one, of course – in the Bay Horse.

Back outside, the swifts can be heard but not seen. The wires are empty. “You don’t expect them to poise for you, do you?” says the lady, though slightly worryies that it might have been a swallow after all.

Whatever they say about one swallow not making a summer, the circling swifts seem happy enough with theirs.

SIX days later we return to Masham, Mrs McCowen not having been around on the first occasion.

It should straight away be confessed, therefore, that whatever it was on the high wire – sparrow, house martin, golden eagle– it sure as eggs wasn’t a swift. The first two are only distantly related to the swift, the golden eagle not at all.

“Swifts don’t perch anywhere,” says Mrs McCowen, formerly a paediatrician at Stockton and Northallerton hospitals who moved to Masham 18 years ago. “They’ve incredibly short legs, might go three years without landing, can only scrabble into holes. If they land they can’t take off again. Even stuff for their nests can be taken on the wing.

“Someone worked out once how far they fly in a lifetime, including every year to South Africa. It was several times to the moon and back.”

The leaflet which accompanies the “Find the Masham Swifts” trail reckons that swifts have made the 3,100-mile journey in five days and that, on a fine day, a pair might feed 20,000 insects to their young.

Masham was thought a haven because the eaves of the high old houses made perfect nesting places –much lower and the fledglings couldn’t even launch from the nest. Now houses are being made airtight, the problem exacerbated by an 80 per cent decline in Britain’s insect population.

Around 50 people attended the first public meeting. Though numbers, like the swifts, have declined, the group’s still vibrant. Around 40 nesting boxes have been made and distributed, 18 housed in the tower of St Mary’s church.

“They won’t nest immediately but we believe they’ve shown an interest. I’m quite optimistic about next year,” says Mrs McCowen.

“The swifts are iconic, if you like, to Masham, but they’re iconic to Europe. We’ve already lost a huge amount of wildlife. It would be a tragedy if they never came back.”