Abbots Ripton Hall

Abbots Ripton Hall is a stately home with parapet walls offering ideal opportunities for Swift nest boxes, and it is the home of Lord de Ramsey who is very much a wildlife enthusiast.

For this project we supplied half brick entrance pieces and John Stimpson provided modified Model 30's. Instead of the entrance in the front, a larger rectangular hole was made in the back. The work was undertaken by Gavin Smith and his team.

The parapet is a solid wall, with plenty of headers providing opportunities for Swift boxes. Removing the headers was easy enough, but on the inside, some of the walls were rendered on top of chicken mesh which required cutting away.

8 boxes have been installed in 3 different parts of the parapet. If/when these are successful, there is scope for many more.

From this aspect, all of the boxes are in view, but barely visible

3 out of 8 entrances

Model 30's inside the parapet

Lid off showing access tunnel through the wall.

#parapet

The Cambridge System with circular entrance pieces

This is a nice implementation of the Cambridge System with circular entrance pieces

Thanks for the pictures are due to Graham Fry, who lives near St Neots.

With rendered walls, one cannot see where the bricks are in order to go about removing a brick to make an entrance.  While one could tackle the problem from the inside, one risks making a mess of the render. So making a hole with a  4 inch core drill from the outside is another way of doing it. Then circular entrance pieces neatly fill the hole.

This is a solid wall 9 inches thick, but a 4 inch core drill is an efficient way to make a hole all of the way through.

Making holes with a 4inch core drill

Entrance pieces inserted

Nest boxes installed.

A circular entrance piece

#cambridge

First installation of retrofitted S Bricks

These are the first pictures of retrofitted S Bricks. The S Brick is particularly suited for retrofit as it spans just one course of bricks, and, normally is confined to the outer leaf and the cavity, though this first installation was slightly different.

John Hunt in Northants already has Swifts breeding in a Zeist and a Model 30 on his gable, so he decided to give the S Brick a go. The boxes are at a level where there is an unheated room, and John wanted access to the boxes from the inside.  As the S Brick is made on a laser cutter, it can be tailored to fit the space available, so it was easy to adjust the depth of the box to bridge the cavity and inner leaf. In this case, the cavity was 60mm, so extra floor area needed to be found somehow. The floor area is 475 sq cm and headroom is 80mm, quite a bit larger than our successful experimental swift bricks

Although essentially straightforward, it was not as easy as it should have been because of a measurement miscommunication, a sliver of brick required trimming with an angle grinder.

Normally the back of the S Brick is closed, but we cut a rectangular hole to allow for a removable door. It also allows for a perspex back and a camera in due course.

S Brick with brick slip cast out of sand and cement.
Note clear labelling of Top (and Bottom)

S Brick rear view showing the nest form.The open back was a tailored feature for this implementation.

2 S Bricks installed. A reasonable colour match was achieved with some red dye.

Distant view of gable

Internal view of installed S Brick with Velcro surround

Backs installed

#sbox