Dinton Church

This is a job particularly well done, so should be an inspiration to others. Back in August 2018 Sue Hetherington got in touch about swift boxes in the belfry of Saints Peter & Paul in Dinton, Bucks. The belfry has large louvres, more widely spaced than normal, meaning that 2 levels of entrances could fit between each pair of louvres. (We did something like this in St Mary's, St Neots).

After batting photos and measurements back and forth we, AfS, suggested a configuration (see below) which has been very competently adapted and implemented by carpenter Nick Deschamps, resulting in 16 new nest boxes in the belfry. Rosemary Jackson takes up the story:

The church of SS Peter & Paul, Dinton

"The idea for installing swift nest boxes in our village church was triggered by three incidents in 2017.

We went to the Rutland Bird fair in August 2017 and there we saw the Action for Swifts display. An enthusiastic carpenter had brought the front of a bank of nest boxes which he told us fitted in his church tower and had attracted a new colony of swifts to his village.

Also, in 2017 there was a study group amongst the churches in my area about the idea of the Eco Church and how we could make our churches more environmentally friendly.

The next summer I found out that the only nest site for swifts in my area had been blocked up and we were then very concerned that we would not get swifts back in the village. Happily, one pair nested somewhere because we had five swifts screaming around the village in August and giving us such great pleasure as they always do.

I decided that I would act to promote swifts somehow. I wrote a book about a family of swifts for young children and an artist friend illustrated it. By amazing serendipity her husband had just retired and was looking for a project to pursue and the challenge of making swift nest boxes and installing them in the church tower fired his imagination.

16 boxes installed

We realized very quickly that this was no straightforward project. After examining the Action for Swifts website and contacting a Bucks Bird Club friend we were put in touch with Dick Newell who developed a plan of 16 nest boxes to fit our very ancient church louvres inside the bell chamber. Nick set to work on the carpentry and all the winter of 2018/2019 worked on 4 banks of 4 nest boxes. Eventually when the weather got warmer, we were able to try a model in the bell chamber, and eventually mid-March fitted the real things, even putting chicken feathers in the nesting cups to get the swifts started on the soft furnishings.

At the beginning of May we plan to start playing the screaming swift family calls to alert swifts coming back from Africa that there are nest boxes here inviting occupancy.

We also plan that, should we be fortunate enough to attract out own family of swifts we will fit a camera into the nesting box and arrange a cctv so that we can have a birdwatching day with the local school children, setting up telescopes and a laptop with live pictures and information on this amazing miracle bird.

British wildlife is truly wonderful!

Rosemary Jackson,

Church warden "

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The original concept model:

Conservation Evidence

Conservation Evidence is a free, authoritative information resource designed to support decisions about how to maintain and restore global biodiversity. It summarises the results of studies that have tested a wide range of conservation interventions and also categorises each intervention according to whether this evidence demonstrates that they are likely to be beneficial, of unknown benefit or unlikely to be beneficial. There is also a Conservation Evidence journal, that publishes the results of studies that have tested the effectiveness of conservation interventions, and welcomes short articles from conservation practitioners.

14 nest boxes in St Mary’s church, Ely, UK

showing 4 boxes with nest forms and 1 box
without a nest form occupied by common
swifts. (click to enlarge)

On searching the Conservation Evidence website for the keyword "swift", there is just one paper, of unknown effectiveness, titled Provide artificial nesting sites for swifts - about Vaux's Swift.

All of the research in this country and in Europe does not seem to have resulted in anything documenting a conservation benefit for the Common Swift on the CE website.

So, encouraged by Prof Bill Sutherland, Miriam Rothschild Professor of Conservation Biology in the department of zoology at Cambridge University, I wrote up the results of our experiments on placing nest forms in Swift nest boxes:

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A test of the use of artificial nest forms in common swift Apus apus nest boxes in southern England

Dick Newell

Action for Swifts, Old Beach Farm, 91 Green End, Landbeach, Cambridge, CB25 9FD, UK

SUMMARY

Common swifts Apus apus have shown significant declines in the UK over recent decades, and one possible cause is loss of nesting sites. Nest boxes have previously shown to be effective for this species. Here we test whether the addition of an artificial ‘nest form’ affected the occupancy of nest boxes. Nest boxes that contained a form were 4.6 times more likely to be occupied by common swifts than nest boxes without a form. The design of the form did not appear to affect occupancy rate. Further study is needed to discover whether nest forms increase overall occupancy rates.

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You can access the paper here