For thirty years, the swift — that boomerang-winged traveler arriving each spring from central Africa — has been quietly disappearing from British skies, its numbers down by three-quarters since 1995. Monmouthshire County Council has now called on residents to act, recognizing that the fate of a migratory species rests not in distant reserves but in the eaves and garden corners of ordinary homes. It is a reminder that the boundaries between the wild world and the human one are thinner than we imagine, and that conservation, at its most essential, is a matter of collective memory — of choosing