Swifts are soaring

There's been some great news about people taking up the request to put swift boxes on churches or religious buildings.  

My article appeared in The Tablet and was called Holy Birds of the Heavens.

Holy Birds of the Heaven : Tablet 21 April 2012

St Albans putting up swift boxes

 St Albans got on with it straight away as they already had scaffolding on the roof.

St Beuno's

St Beuno's in N Wales - the Jesuit retreat house featured in The Big Silence - are just about to put up two boxes and will send pictures when they do.

The Churches Conservation Trust have also agreed to put up swift boxes in suitable places - they have 341 churches that might work!  They are in the process of getting a plan together so I'll keep you posted.

There has also been interest from Bristol Cathedral - so watch this space for swift updates.

Save Our Swifts

This is a photo of swifts swooping around a medieval tower in Assisi, I couldn't believe how many there were.  The noise filled the air and they formed clouds of dark, shifting shapes against a beautiful blue sky.  They haven't arrived in the UK yet, hopefully in the next couple of weeks.

There is a lot of concern about the rapid decline of the Common Swift in the UK, and right across europe.  As we smooth out, replace, restore and otherwise blank out our old buildings we take away the holes and crevasses that swifts need.  SE England has lost 1/2 of its breeding birds.  I'll have an article in The Tablet soon asking religious buildings across Europe to put swift nest boxes on their tall towers.  This is such a simple way to care for the natural world.

You can get all the info you need from Swift Conservation

I'll post the article when it is published, but if you know of any religious buildings that already have swifts nesting in them or are planning on putting up boxes do let me know.

The First Swifts of Summer

Out for a run at 7.30 am and heard a familiar sound  - the scream of swifts as they wheeled overhead.  It stopped me in my tracks and I shouted SWIFTS! The poor man walking past me gave me a strange look and a wide berth.  This is what Richard Mabey wrote about swifts in his book Nature Cure

“As a relationship my thing with swifts is so one sided as to be hardly worthy of the name.  The birds don’t give a fig about me or any of us.  Yet they are connected with us indirectly, even when we are not aware of them, through the environments and senses that we share.  We respond to spring, to the lift of fine weather, to the basic biological urge to play… On Ascension Day I was sent this short poem out of the blue:

May, Just into

Double figures.

Everything green

And brilliant-

The first warm day.

Soft shoes, no socks,

Then you call out

The swifts are back!

Listen.  Look up!

Listen.  Look up!  Did birds like swifts arriving mysteriously in the spring, reappearing from nowhere at dawn, play their part in the generation of resurrection stories?  Do they still register at the corners of our vision and reason, something immanent?  Despite our science and our humanism, our whole culture is infused with myths and symbols of landscape and nature, emblems of the seasons, of decay and rebirth, of the boundaries between the wild and tame, myths of migration and transmigration of invisible monsters and lands of lost content.”

Welcome back swifts - you gladden the heart.