Ejercicio 2 · La mujer que cuenta vencejos

The woman who counts swifts

Every May, Margaret Ellis climbs onto the flat roof of her building in the old part of town with a folding chair, a notebook and a pair of binoculars she bought in 1994. She is there to count swifts, the small dark birds that arrive from Africa and spend the summer screaming around the rooftops.

She began almost by accident. A neighbour complained that the birds were noisy and wanted the holes under the roof tiles blocked. Margaret, who had never shown much interest in birds, decided to find out how many were actually nesting there before anyone did anything. The answer, that first summer, was eleven pairs.

Twenty-two years later she has counted every season but one, when she was in hospital. Her notebooks are now used by a university team studying how city birds cope with rising temperatures. What makes them valuable is not that they are clever, she says, but that they are boring: the same roof, the same weeks, the same hours, year after year.

The numbers have fallen. There are four pairs now, and Margaret is careful not to blame anyone in particular. Old buildings get repaired, holes get filled, and nobody means any harm. What worries her more is that when she stops, there is no one ready to take the chair up to the roof.