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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Inside the Cotswolds farmhouse that's had 'a restoration of rare artistry and scale', now being sold by Ellen DeGeneres and Portia de RossiEllen DeGeneres and Portia de Rossi swapped California for a Cotswolds farmhouse just a year ago, and are already on the move — meaning that their Oxfordshire home, Kitesbridge Farm, is on the market.
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'We are not, this cruise company would have us believe, on a cruise': What life is like on a boat designed to rival luxury yacht charter without the price tagWave goodbye to your concerns about cruising aboard a small ship in the South of France, says Imogen West-Knights.
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No job too big: Britain's native breeds can save our countrysideBritain’s native breeds and their grazing talents are an integral part of the drive to balance food production with biodiversity recovery. We should look closer to home in the quest to re-create the natural habitats of the past
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Bruce Hodgson: Artichoke's founder on catflaps, carpentry and the future of craftsBruce Hodgson, one of Britain's best furniture makers and carpenters, joins the Country Life Podcast.
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A wing and a prayer: saving our farmland bird populationsBy bridging ‘the hungry gap’ with supplementary feeding, we can breathe life into our declining farmland bird populations, but farming practices must be changed to secure their future.
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The 'greatest battle for 300 years': England's great estates face up to a green futureThe climate crisis will affect us all. All over Britain, major landowners are stepping up to tackle a warming world and biodiversity loss.
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'He unleashed a series of war cries, then intercepted the vole mid-air': There's nothing remotely common about the common kestrelKnown in Orkney as ‘moosie-haak’, kestrels are fierce hunters but have seriously declined and are now an amber-listed species.
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The truth about P.G. Wodehouse: Robert Daws on playing England's greatest comic writerThe actor Robert Daws starred alongside Stephen Fry and Hugh Laurie in Jeeves and Wooster back in the 1990s, and the work of P.G. Wodehouse has been part of his decades-long career ever since. He joined the Country Life Podcast.
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Don't judge a plant by its smell: Why 'the little stinkers of the natural world' are just doing their jobReminiscent of love and with an unmistakable odour of death, the little stinkers of the natural world might incite repulsion, but they are only doing their job, pleads Ian Morton
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Puffins and shearwaters, skuas and terns, gannets and gulls and guillemots and wings, these are a few of our favourite things (seabirds)From a heroic long-distance swimmer to a producer of spectacularly eerie sound effects, the seabirds seen swooping and diving over British waters have all manner of singular skills.
