Greenhavens Network

SWiFTS iN THE SKiES

Summer’s coming when you hear the swift...Their shrill call heralding my favourite time of year and the start of warmer days. Since my childhood I have enjoyed watching their acrobatic displays as they dart and flit about catching insects on their way.

This weekend I had the pleasure of helping to put up seven swift boxes in Newhaven and Seaford and by the time this article is published am hoping they all have swift residents! We at Greenhavens were lucky enough to have The Monday Group kindly make the swift boxes and after finding our hero of the day, Dave Boddington, he kindly put them up. Scaling scary heights Dave and the house owners found the right places for the boxes and now we await their arrival from Africa.

Swifts are incredibly clever birds, finding their way each year back to their nests and leaving us once again to fly back to Africa. Rarely touching ground, they sleep, eat, and mate on the wing. Catching raindrops or skimming surface water, they cover huge distances and their agility is far superior to many of our other bird friends. Having shared our buildings for over 2,000 years, they are on the decline as newer buildings offer no nesting sites and old buildings are often re-insulated, blocking off old nest sites. And as insect populations decline they have less food to catch. In less than 20 years a third of British Swifts have been lost – it’s a worrying figure but we can help them.

Installing a swift box helps enormously in keeping our swifts returning year after year – ask your neighbours too as Swifts love nesting in colonies. Boxes can be ordered on www.swift-conservation.org and do ask for help from our fantastic local swift groups in Lewes and Seaford. Not all of us can fit a box on our houses, mine is too low, but we can all help by surveying our skies and entering sightings on the RSPB’s swiftmapper. org.uk any time you hear and see them swoop through the skies. We can also help by leaving our gardens a little wilder, allowing the insects they need to feed on grow. If we all did a little bit, it would amount to a lot in preserving our skies for swifts.

So watch the skies at the beginning of May for the ‘advance guard’ who are coming to clean the nests out and prepare to bring up their young. Please do record any sightings and enjoy their acrobatic display. For me their calls are an important memory and remind me summer is coming...

Photos from top: A swift box fitted on to a house; Dave Boddington installing the swift boxes with resident, Lisa.

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