The Screaming Sky: in pursuit of swifts

Shortlisted for the Wainwright Prize for Nature Writing, 2021. Swifts live in perpetual summer. They inhabit the earth like nothing else on the planet.

They watched the continents shuffle to their present positions and the mammals evolve. They are not ours, though we like to claim them. They defer all our categories and present no passports as they surf the world's winds.

They sleep in the air, their wings controlled by an alert half-brain. Yet for all their adaptability and longevity swifts have recently been added to the Red List of endangered birds. The Screaming Sky is a radical new look at the common swift, a numerous but profoundly uncommon bird, by Charles Foster, author of the New York Times bestseller Being a Beast.

Foster follows swifts lyrically, manically yet scientifically. The poetry of swifts lies in their facts and this book, the paperback of the Wainwright shortlisted monograph, draws deeply on the latest extraordinary discoveries.