Helping provide homes for the Isle of Wight's nesting swifts

This month we are looking at swifts.

Some later-nesting swifts will still have young in August but others will have finished breeding during the second half of July and headed back to overwintering grounds in central and south-east Africa.

These incredible birds stay with us for a comparatively short time but they are a quintessential part of summer, treating us to spectacular aerial acrobatics over our towns and villages and zipping low over the rooftops in exuberant screaming parties.

The full name of the species of swift that breeds in the UK and on the Isle of Wight is the common swift.

Action for Swifts (Image: Action for Swifts)

However, it is no longer as ‘common’ as it once was having declined by over 50 per cent in the UK since the year 2000.

Indeed, it is now on the Red list of Birds of Conservation Concern.

Numbers are thought to be plummeting largely due to the loss of nest sites, which are in cavities high within walls and roofs of older buildings.

Swifts access these cavities through narrow gaps and holes but these are being filled in during renovation work.

Other swifts lose their homes when older buildings are demolished and replaced with modern structures.

Modern building techniques, which include the installation of plastic fascias and soffits, do not provide the access holes that the birds need.

Thankfully, we can help swifts by providing them with alternative homes.

To try to help stem the decline of swifts here on the Isle of Wight, the Isle of Wight Natural History and Archaeological Society set up the IW Swift Box Scheme in 2022 in collaboration with the group Hampshire Swifts, who had already been making and installing swift boxes in Hampshire since 2016 and agreed to install boxes on the Island as well.

The scheme is co-ordinated by the society’s iWatch Wildlife project, thanks to funding from Isle of Wight National Landscape.

Over the three years that the scheme has been running, almost 140 boxes have been installed, which is great news, but more still needs to be done to help our declining swifts.

It is hoped that the scheme will continue in 2025.

If you would like to find out more about ordering a swift nestbox, send an email to iwswifts@gmail.com.

Boxes need to be sited 5m high under the overhang of the roof and there should be a clear flyway in front of the box.

Another type of alternative nest site is the swift brick.

Developers and builders can really help swifts and other red-listed birds such as house sparrows by installing swift bricks into new buildings.

These are integrated into the fabric of the building, are self-contained and require no maintenance.

It is an excellent way in which biodiversity can be increased in the built environment to benefit both wildlife and people.

Local councils can help by emphasising the need for nesting bricks to be installed. Please contact us for a list of suppliers and further information.

Swifts are reliant on us – or at least our buildings – for breeding and we need to find ways of providing nest sites for them now that our building techniques have changed. Numbers will otherwise continue to fall.