WHEN the old woman died and her family began to clear out the house, they never expected to find this: a dead swift snuggled neatly into a teacup in the bedroom. Bizarre certainly, but there was more – they were to find another dead bird in the same bedroom, this time inside a wardrobe. The big Victorian red-bricked house near Antrim is exactly the sort of place that swifts would be attracted to. If anyone would know what had happened, then Mark Smyth, swift expert beyond compare, would surely know. But even he was stumped this week. “I knew the lady who lived there for 40 years,” mark told Dúlra, “but she had dementia for a long time before she died and then her daughter found these two birds in one of her bedrooms. “We can only guess that the birds somehow found their way into the bedroom and flew around in a panic. One got into the wardrobe and couldn’t get out, while the other landed on the cup and couldn’t get back out.” The bird in the cup had been dead so long that it was mummified -– made up totally of feathers, the flesh long gone. When the bird was lifted out, it remained curved. It had obviously been there for many years. Swifts only touch land to breed, and that could be three years after they leave the nest as chicks. Touching down is riddled with danger as they’re so aerodynamic that they can’t get airborne from a standing start. One once came down in Dúlra’s garden when he was a lad and he had to fling it back into the air and it flew off unharmed.