Swift decline of 40% in Britain in the past decade

The swifts are going now from our village. Perhaps we should pause to enjoy them one last time before the final few depart. The miracle of swifts, perhaps the miracle of all life, is made more apparent if you think of them not as birds, but as insects. For swifts are made from nothing but tiny invertebrates floating in the ether. A flock of 30 and everything about them — that noise, those scintillating movements, their feathers, those air-filled bones as light as grass — is a distillation of billions of insects. And when I say billions, I mean it. A single mouthful of food passed from an adult swift to its chick can contain 300 insects. Alas, the miracle of swifts is fading. In the past decade they've declined in Britain by 40%. Just as we might see the swifts' sky-trawl as composed of nothing but insects, we should recall that our own dance consumes almost every other living thing around us.

Source:
The Guardian, 5 August 2012
http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2012/aug/05/ruralaffairs-birds#st…