Swift Awareness Week

Swift Awareness Week (16-23 June) has over 80 events across the UK all designed to help you learn about this extraordinary bird and how to help it. Nick Brown from the Derbyshire Swift Conservation Project explains how we can all help these beautiful birds.

Swifts, unlike swallows and martins, are a dark brown all over. What’s more, you’ll never see them perching on telegraph wires or trees. They are superbly aerial birds only landing when they need to breed and lay eggs.

Like swallows, they migrate south and spend the winter in Africa but unlike swallows, they never touch the ground there but remain constantly on the wing. The huge Congo forests are their winter refuge and they fly endlessly above the trees feeding on whatever insects they can find. Only when they return to the UK in May do they have to land, usually just below the tiny entrance holes to their nesting places in our roofs or occasionally under our tiles.

What’s most striking about our swifts is the exuberant screaming parties they form, hustling together low over our rooftops and making their very distinctive screaming sounds.

If summer in our towns and village has a distinctive sound surely it must be that of the swifts screaming above our heads on a balmy summer evening close to their nest sites. Sadly, as older properties get renovated, have new roofs and soffits or get knocked down, so the spaces the swifts need to lay their eggs are blocked up or destroyed.

Additionally, new buildings are so hermetically sealed there’s no way a swift could gain entry.
This is a major cause of the bird’s decline but it is something we can counteract by putting up nest boxes. IN existing buildings these are external boxes fitted just under the eaves.

In new builds, we need to persuade developers, architects and councils that it is easy and cheap to put built in, internal nest boxes into new walls. Once in place the boxes require no maintenance since swifts, unable to land and pick up nesting materials, rely on a few airborne feathers to make a very flimsy nest inside our buildings or in their nest boxes.

Attend any swift awareness week event and you’ll find out more about these amazing birds, the 65+ local groups across the UK which work to help them and how you too can play a part.

Full details of all 80 events are on the excellent Action for Swifts site here.