Durham Swift City: The project takes flight

Durham Swift City: The project takes flight

Nick Upton

Since we began our Durham Swift City appeal, 46 individual and very generous donations from our supporters and other charitable groups have enabled us to turn a £1000 donation from local construction company, Sunter Ltd, into an incredible £10,000. Find out how the project has taken flight in this blog, by Mary-Anne Rielly.

Do you ever feel the urge to run the approximately 5,000 miles to Africa and back, without stopping? Eating, drinking, sleeping, all on foot? No, neither do I. But that’s what swifts do. 

Well, almost. 

Twice a year, swifts complete the enormous migration between their over-wintering sites in Africa and their breeding sites in the UK, only ever touching down to nest. And if you’re a fledgling swift, you’ve got it even tougher. You won’t be nesting for at least two to three years, so chances are as soon as you leave your nest, you’ll be strictly airborne for four to six of these back-to-back mammoth migrations. 

Swift in mid-flight against blue sky, wings spread wide, tail fanned, chasing a small insect. Photo taken by Jon Hawkins – Surrey Hills Photography

A swift about to capture some aerial plankton. Credit: Jon Hawkins – Surrey Hills Photography.

Swifts are site-faithful, meaning that they will return to the same breeding sites every year. Now, imagine if you had just braved the journey from Equatorial Guinea, round the Ivory Coast and then past Western Sahara, up through Morocco, then Spain, all the way to the UK. Driven all the while by your motivation to mate and reproduce, you arrive in the UK only to find that your lovely, safe nesting space under the fascia has been blocked up with a PVC soffit. Where do you go?

Sadly, this situation is becoming increasingly common for our swifts. Swifts have declined by more than 68% since 1995, largely due to a decrease in suitable nesting sites.

‘But houses haven’t been around forever!’ I hear you cry. Well, maybe not you, but someone else. 

Of course, swifts didn’t suddenly, out-of-the-blue, hurtle into existence as soon as the first farmhouse was erected. But, as so much of our native wildlife has had to do, swifts have evolved over generations to co-exist with expanding human settlements and adapt to situations brought about by vast habitat change. Swifts have largely made the switch from nesting in old trees and cavities in cliffs and mountains to the nooks and crannies of traditional buildings. After all, they were running out of options. And to thank the swifts for their quiet compromise, how do we return the favour? Well, we box the nooks and crannies up, of course!

Common swift (Apus apus) screaming party silhouetted against the sky as they fly in formation over cottage roofs at dusk

Nick Upton

Luckily, there’s a saving grace. Perhaps because of their close associations with towns and cities, people really do love swifts. They are highly anticipated harbingers of summer, and if you’ve ever been lucky enough to be able to sit and watch their impressive aerial displays of coordinated loops and spins above and between the rooftops, it is clear to see why they are so adored. And when people love something, they want to care for it. What better evidence than the support we have received so far for Durham Swift City

In the three or so months since we began our Durham Swift City appeal, 46 individual and very generous donations from our supporters and other charitable groups have enabled us to turn a £1000 donation from local construction company, Sunter Ltd, into an incredible £10,000. And it’s not just financial support we have received; kind messages of encouragement, helpful advice from others trying to boost swift populations in the North East, and, vitally, permission from various churches around County Durham for the installation of swift boxes in their church towers – these acts of support have allowed Durham Wildlife Trust to lay the foundations for a major swift project in County Durham and beyond. So, what have we achieved in the first three months of Durham Swift City?

July

For me, July is a month of introductions. An introduction to Mike Harris, Durham Wildlife Trust member and mastermind behind the idea for Durham Swift City; an introduction to Madeleine Fabusova, who I met while bird-ringing and who happens to be an ornithologist and climber (aka. a perfect candidate for installing swift boxes), and an introduction to the often-challenging internal architecture of churches. Because of this latter reality, our first meeting had to be held in the training classroom of Houghton-le-Spring's MRS Training and Rescue, where we would spend the day completing a Working Safely at Heights course. Here we learnt how to secure ourselves when climbing to and working at heights – an important skill when you consider that some of the ladders leading to church louvre windows, where we would eventually be installing the swift boxes, could be up to six metres high. 

Qualifications secured, and with nearly £4000 of our £10,000 goal already raised, we could now think about purchasing the swift boxes, PPE and call players (little audio speakers which play swift calls in hopes of attracting swifts to the new boxes). 

Wooden bird house with oval entrance sits on top of stacked planks and wire in outdoor workshop.

Our very smart, custom-built swift boxes from WildShack.

August

I say Durham Swift City has been in operation for three months, but really, for Mike, it has been a concept for many more. For several months now, Mike has been contacting churches across County Durham to drum up potential swift box installation sites. Swift boxes on church tower louvre windows are ideal swift nesting sites as churches are permanent, very high up, and there is usually at least one in every town and village so they have potential to form a very connected swift network. As a result, by the time August rolled around we had four churches on-board for Durham Swift City: St Brandon’s in Brancepeth, St Cuthbert’s and St Oswald’s in Durham City and St Stephen’s in Willington. 

Mike has been doing the groundwork for Durham Swift City for quite some time, so our recces to the churches listed above weren’t the first times Mike had ever been up a church tower. This means that while Mike got straight to work with measuring the louvre windows; writing down what lengths of plywood and nails we would need, where we would install the cable for the call players, how many swift boxes we could install per window etc, I was busy just taking in the complexity of the structures I found all around me. Six huge, bronze (or brass, as is the case at St Stephen’s) bells connected and secured by a series of wooden and metal frames, beams, wheels and lots of heavy duty ropes in a marvelling feat of engineering – how on earth did they get all of this up here?! Would the noise of the bells – which I could only assume was deafening at this proximity to them – affect the swifts? The answer is no, Mike assured me, an answer evidenced by the many successful case studies of similar church swift projects across the UK. 

So, now we knew what materials we would need, how we could safely navigate ourselves up to the church towers, and we had secured permission to start the installations. Now comes the exciting bit!

September and October

In September, only two months after starting the appeal, Durham Wildlife Trust were hugely grateful to have achieved our goal of £10,000 to support Durham Swift City. This enabled us to purchase the final tools and materials needed to be ready for installing swift boxes.

On Wednesday 8th October, it was finally time to complete the first swift box installation of Durham Swift City. I met Mike and Madeleine at the beautiful St Brandon’s church in Brancepeth and we got straight to work with carrying all of the equipment and swift boxes up to the church tower. Well, almost straight to work- it took us the best part of 15 minutes to figure our harnesses out...  Luckily for us, it turns out three people is a magic number for installing swift boxes; one person to pass up the tools, one person to fix the boxes to the windows, and one person to hold the torch and take the progress pictures! Within a few hours, all eight swift boxes had been securely fastened to the louvre window, resulting in a very professional-looking, multi-storey swift apartment complex.

Arched stone window with diamond panes and wooden bird boxes.

Our finished swift apartment complex!

It can take swifts two to three years to occupy a swift box, so we probably won’t get any tenants in our new apartment complex for a few years yet. This gives us plenty of time to complete similar swift box installations in other church towers across the region - thanks to the money and support raised for Durham Swift City so far - and we are grateful to be able to say we have several other churches lined up for completion before the New Year.

Hopefully, by the time swifts are ready to move into St Brandon’s, they will have the luxury of choosing between many safe nesting sites across County Durham and beyond. 

Donate to support our Durham Swift City findraising campaign