69 
large spirals into the sky out of sight, and at last out of hearing; 
for they generally scream the whole time. One can watch them 
with a binocular after they are out of ordinary sight, a compact 
little cloud rising and fading away in the darkness. And they 
don’t come home till morning. They roost up there. At first 
all of them, but when the eggs are laid, the male birds only; 
and not on stormy nights. Now, ladies and gentlemen, I do not 
expect } r ou to believe this—at first. I did not believe it myself. 
In the year 1886, out in the garden after dinner, my younger 
brother, Cyril Edwards, now Rector of Mottisfont, in Hampshire, 
said to me: “ I believe those Swifts go up and roost in the sky.” 
I said: “ Oh, nonsense.” “ Well,” he said, “ there they are, 
you can hear them ,they are going up now, you just watch them, 
they go up out of sight, and I believe they roost in the clouds.” 
We watched them in the dusk, and at last they disappeared from 
sight up aloft. I said: “ This is very strange, and I must find 
out about it, but it will take more than one to do it. You have 
got to go away to-morrow, but next year if we are at home 
together we’ll go into the matter and settle it.” Next year, 
1887, we were at home together, and one fine evening, after 
watching the Swifts up aloft at 9.10, I sat on a tombstone under 
the south eaves of the church, where most of the Swifts built, 
until 10.30. My father and my brother watched by turns on the 
north side. I could see the bats, the beetles and the moths 
against the starlit sky, but no Swifts returned. On several other 
nights I watched till n, not quite continuously, but quite closely 
enough to make certain that none returned. If you have ever 
sat alone on a tombstone in a Churchyard for a couple of hours 
at night, shut off by walls and hedges from the rest of the living 
world you might begin to think, as the cold crept over you, that 
the old Clerk was not very far out after all. The conclusion, to 
anyone knowing the habits of the Swifts, is irresistible. They 
go up and stay there. What is the six or seven hours of a 
summer night to a bird with such powers of flight as the Swift? 
All it has to do is keep its head to the wind and its balance, no 
exertion is required, but, of course, the birds cannot sleep. I 
wrote to “ Nature,” giving an account of this discovery. My 
letter was published on October 27th, 1887. Other bird lovers 
were observing the same thing elsewhere, but my letter was the 
first, and so we got the credit. People say “ Of course, they 
go and roost elsewhere, you can’t prove that they remain in the 
air.” No, I can’t. Mathematical proof is almost impossible, but 
bearing in mind the fact that the' Swift has never been known 
to settle in the daytime, except at its own home, the difficulties 
in the way of the theory that they roost in distant cliffs—the 
only reasonable alternative—are greater than that of their re¬ 
maining on the wing during the night. 
1 he hen birds come out to feed in the evening, and the 
males, just before they ascend, try to drive them back to the 
nest. You will see one bird swooping at another like a hawk. 
