Discounting the recent succession of heatwaves, and acknowledging that Pimm’s, strawberries and BBQs figure too, it is the iconic sounds of an English summer that mark the season for many of us: the sound of leather on willow, racket on ball; Greensleeves played by the ice cream van; squeals of delight from children playing in a pool…

But for me there are two quintessential sounds of summer.  The first is the sound of a petrol lawn mower, best heard in the evening, when it reminds me of my father cutting the grass at our home in Tempsford on a summer’s evening when I had gone to bed – one of my earliest memories.

The second is the sound of the swifts who start to appear in our skies on the cusp of summer, their numbers swelling through the weeks of June.  We look forward to their arrival, hoping that this will be the year that they choose to use our nestboxes for the first time.  

Woken by their piercing cries, we lie in bed and watch them swooping, jinking, shooting through the air. Sometimes, several in formation race across the sky.  

They are remarkable creatures, their whole lives spent airborne, except when nesting.  They eat, drink, bathe, sleep and mate on the wing, reach 69 mph in level flight, and migrate 6000 miles to and from Africa to breed here.

Aptly, the collective noun for a swift is a scream.