There are no paddy fields on this island to feed the young of swift fliers. But pockets of grasses and unruly herbs, more often closely cropped but at times tall and tender, still survive between grander erections. Barren plots, spaces formerly occupied by shophouses and mansions too lofty for conservation, nurse the seeds and spores of vascular pioneers who sprout from the cracks that form between ground and wall or erupt to colonise land left fallow until the next best bid.
In these slits of bland soil, doomed by the imperative of urban renewal, grow the soft blades and stiff shoots that nourish the plainest of wanderers. Drably clad, with thickset, hairy bodies, but nominally butterflies by virtue of their clubbed antennae and diurnal habits, swifts are a tribe of skippers with varying shades of brown and hyaline wing markings that range from indistinct spots to polygonal patches. A few species rely on bamboo to complete their life-cycle. But others, such as the small branded swift, have catholic tastes, so long as the host is of poaceous extract. Rice, lallang, sugar cane, citronella and the coarse cowgrass used to create instant lawns are all game for this tough little thing, who must endure the opprobium of residents averse to flying pests and whose grubs eclose from fibrous tubes to haunt the terraces of an estate that once prospered by the coast and now strains to hold back the tide of properties built to beggar the neighbours and burnish its past.
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