Summer has truly dawned when our swifts arrive and, on June 7, these avian Spitfires will be celebrated in World Swift Day, with nest-site walks from Kazakhstan to Spain. From June 28 – July 6, Swift Awareness Week UK will see events highlighting the extraordinary life cycle of these birds, which spend the vast majority of their time in the air. Nest-box footage shows young swifts doing press-ups: once fledged, they will not alight again for three years.
Yet the species is in dire straits. Swifts are dependent on crevices in buildings, now too often filled in, for their nests. A simple solution is a swift brick — widely adopted in Gibraltar with uplifting results — yet the efforts of campaigners to mandate swift bricks in new homes here were recently frustrated again with the rejection of an amendment to the planning bill.
‘It is gut-wrenching,’ says Hannah Bourne-Taylor, author of Nature Needs You. ‘Without swift bricks, birds reliant on our buildings to breed can’t stabilise their populations. We must lobby our MPs: the more people join the fight, the better chance our swifts have.’
Labour MP Barry Gardiner is urging his party to rethink: ‘Who has not marvelled at the liquidity of swifts on a summer evening? How doltish, how insensible to beauty and life must our ministers be, to block the simplest of legislative amendments that would provide the basic habitat to stop these incomparable creatures facing oblivion. When even the Home Builders Federation declares that swift bricks, which provide a home for eight species of cavity-nesting birds, pose no block to the Government’s targets, it is clear that the biggest cavities are in the hearts and skulls of politicians.’
‘Labour backed my amendment in opposition and it makes no sense at all for them to now whip against it,’ adds Zac Goldsmith. ‘If Labour rejects even this simple and painless measure, what hope is there for the rest of our rapidly declining Nature?’
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