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Swifts in Beijing. Image: source

This article is by guest contributor Michael Rank

Not so long ago summer in Beijing simply wasn't summer without the constant screaming of swifts (or apus apus in Latin) over the gates and hutongs, but in recent years the skies have fallen silent due to the wholesale destruction of traditional buildings and ever growing pollution, according to recent newspaper reports.

Beijing's old-style courtyard buildings, temples and city gates were ideal nesting places for these acrobatic harbingers of summer, and the concrete and steel monstrosities that have replaced them have proved disastrous for the birds which come to breed in Beijing after spending the winter as far away as southern Africa.

Professor Zheng Guangmei (郑光美) of Beijing Normal University, chairman of the China Ornithological Society, recalls cycling past the moat around the Forbidden City in June 1965 and seeing almost 400 of the dark, swallow-like birds. But when another expert, Gao Wu (高武), a retired zoology professor from Capital Normal University, counted swifts at the same spot in July 2000 he noted only 80.

Likewise, Zhao Xinru (赵欣如), a birder and researcher at Beijing Normal University, remembers how when he was at primary school he would see dozens of swifts flying over Zhengyang gate and the birds would sometimes fly into classrooms in search of a nesting site, but this is unthinkable nowadays.

Swifts － 雨燕 ("rain swallows") or 楼燕 ("pagoda swallows") in Chinese － have been synonymous with Beijing since 1417 － indeed an alternative name for the city is Yanjing (燕京) or "swift capital" (admittedly 燕 can mean swift or swallow in Chinese, but one can't help feeling that it refers to the more numerous swift so far as Beijing is concerned).

The swift's demise seems to date back as far back as the early 1950s when the city gates started to be demolished, the first to go being Chang'an Left and Right Gates in 1952, and by the time Dongzhimen was razed in 1969 it seems to have been too late.