Kitchen Garden Forum

For anybody interested, the following petition is appealing for house builders to include special bricks with gaps in them in all new house builds so that the declining swift swift population are not slowly deprived of suitable nesting sites in the future

https://you.38degrees.org.uk/petitions/ ... ks_40ktest

Thanks, signed and passed on to others

Signed

It would be a sad loss to see them disappear. We always eagerly wait for them to arrive every summer where they can be seen flying around our village green where there are some rather old buildings but sadly in recent years the numbers of both swifts and swallows seem to have rapidly declined.

We only get one or two pairs in our village, a lot of single storey buildings they don't seem to like for nesting

Signed & shared.

signed.

I find it heartening that this petition has grown to 70,000 signatures in the space of a few hours. It shows that there are people out there who care about supporting our wildlife.

I had never heard of these Swift bricks before today so must do some research as I would love to encourage swifts to next under our eaves although I don,t how practical/expensive it would be and also what percentage chance of success is likely given the already very small population of them now visiting our village every year.

If they allegedly return to the same sites every year to nest I wonder how likely it would be for them to suddenly find an extra new site a quarter of a mile away from their normal nesting sites. One can hardly put a notice up on yiur roof for them saying "Vacant Nesting Site Here "

Also I imagine eaves which catch the midday sun would not be ideal as the babies would cook in the heat so presumably north facing eaves would ideally be best, which would rule our house out as we face East/West.

Any thoughts?

Some people have used sound recordings of Swifts to encourage them to inspect nest boxes, sure there is info on the 'tinternet somewhere.