Nature Needs You E-Book

Hannah Bourne-Taylor

• Herausgeber: Elliott & Thompson
• Kategorie: Lebensstil
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 407

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2025

Beschreibung

'Reading Hannah's story, compellingly told, you will fall in love with these increasingly endangered birds, true masters of the sky.' Jane Goodall, PhD, DBE The inspirational story of a bird lover who became a nature-warrior in a David v Goliath battle to save swifts from extinction. Nature Needs You tells the compelling story of how Hannah, without campaigning experience, funding or contacts, set out to save swifts from extinction in the UK. Her mission is to change the law and make 'swift bricks' mandatory so that the birds who nest in our walls will have a future in Britain. Nature Needs You delves into the highs and lows of trying to win hearts and minds, grab the news agenda with her naked Feather Speech, win Caroline Lucas and Lord Zac Goldsmith's support, navigate meetings with Secretaries of State and debates in the Houses of Parliament, survive the trolling and midnight self-doubt and raise a petition with the requisite 100,000 signatures for a Parliamentary debate. At stake, with a decline in numbers of over 60% since 1995, are the birds who have become our symbol of summer, the swifts screaming in the skies above us. Steeped in love for the wild, by a talented writer, Nature Needs You is a clarion call to save the nature on our doorsteps and to prove that passion can be a superpower in bringing change to nature-depleted Britain. Raw, funny, self-deprecating and unstoppable in turn, this is nature writing with the pace of a thriller. Hannah is now knocking at the door of the new Labour Secretary of State for Housing, in the hope that, where Rishi Sunak and Michael Gove failed, Angela Rayner and Matthew Pennycook will save our swifts. 'I applaud Hannah's book; her inner steel and her sassy take on conservation are inspiring. I am so heartened that there are courage-driven young women holding nature in the light so that it WILL be seen by the powerful.' Mary Colwell, author of Curlew Moon 'This book might make you scream. It is the story of a fight that started with a promise to a small bird. It is about bird spirit and the spirit of a very singular human. Hannah Bourne-Taylor has a searing eye for both truth and charlatans.' Keggie Carew, author of Beastly 'A wonderful book that will make you furious, hopeful and inspired by turns. Buy it, read it and then become an activist yourself.' Roger Morgan-Grenville, author of Shearwaters

Leseprobe

‘This is a stunningly beautiful story of one woman’s relentless campaign to save an iconic bird. And like her campaign, which caught the imagination of millions, Hannah’s writing is elegant and engaging. The campaign should never have been needed, but it was and the swifts are lucky to have Hannah fighting their corner.’

Zac Goldsmith

‘I applaud Hannah’s book; her inner steel and her sassy take on conservation are inspiring. I am so heartened that there are courage-driven young women holding nature in the light so that it WILL be seen by the powerful.’

Mary Colwell, author of Curlew Moon

‘This book might make you scream. It is the story of a fight that started with a promise to a small bird. It is about bird spirit and the spirit of a very singular human. Hannah Bourne-Taylor has a searing eye for both truth and charlatans. Hannah is a hero of our times who pitted herself against giants.’

Keggie Carew, author of Beastly

‘Throughout Nature Needs You, Bourne-Taylor’s elegant, impassioned and personal prose highlights in detail the challenges facing twenty-first-century conservation, and the innovative and dedicated campaigning required to achieve success.’

Nicholas Gates, naturalist, film maker and author of Orchard

‘Swifts have found a superb champion, whose sheer passion and commitment shine through the pages of this wonderful book.’

Stephen Moss, author of The Starling

‘Told from the biggest heart, this book will make you laugh and cry, will fill you with love and make you gasp at how one person could be so determined to save birds. Every word she writes makes me want to get up and do more for our beautiful natural world. Hannah Bourne-Taylor is a force of nature, and we need more like her – could that be you?’

Kate Bradbury, conservationist

and author of One Garden Against the World

‘A compelling and powerful story of magnificent determination and love for the natural world. We need more people like Hannah.’

Lev Parikian, author of Taking Flight

‘A wonderful book that will make you furious, hopeful and inspired by turns. Buy it, read it and then become an activist yourself.’

Roger Morgan-Grenville, author of Shearwater

‘An inspirational book that screams with urgency, bravery, heartache and hope. By the end you’ll be flocking to take swift action of your own to protect a world that needs us as much as we need it.’

Matt Gaw, author of In All Weathers

‘Nature Needs You is a brave and brilliant book: a manifesto for change fired by love and resolve.’

Julian Hoffman, author of Lifelines

‘Clever, fierce, funny and searingly clear-sighted,

Hannah is an absolute inspiration.’

Nicola Chester, author of On Gallows Down

‘After making a promise to two swift chicks, Hannah embarks on a seemingly impossible campaign journey. Heartfelt and full of passion, her story shows just how much one person can achieve when they have the courage and determination to stand up for what they love.’

Nic Wilson, Land Beneath the Waves

For

my natterjack Daddy, Dr Simon Gates

Lord of the Birds, Zac Goldsmith

the Golden Pillar, Jemma

and 109,896 strangers

Contents

Prologue · The Feather Speech

1    Mayday

2    The Promise

3    Feather-brained

4    Lady Godiva

5    The Petition Launch

6    The Trolls

7    Our Home Is Their Home

8    The Parliamentary Debate

9    Lord Goldsmith’s Swift-Brick Amendment

10   The Rt Honourable Michael Gove, Secretary of State for the DLUHC

11   Amateurs

12   Alliance

13   Safe Passage

14   The Campaign Club

15   Underdogs

16   Nature Needs You

Epilogue · Feathered Neighbours

The Fight to Save our Swifts

The Feather Speech

Acknowledgements

‘It’s not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again . . . who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat.’

– PRESIDENT TEDDY ROOSEVELT

Prologue

The Feather Speech

5 November 2022

On a cold November noon tinged by the electric yellow light of a grey autumn day, I stepped out of a black cab on the edge of Hyde Park, almost naked. Painted from neck to toe in inked feathers, wearing only a thong and ankle boots, I was a stark contrast to the anorak-clad passers-by whose shocked stares cemented the fact that what I was doing was extreme, radical even.

I walked through a waiting crowd, bum flashing, grateful that my waist-long hair covered my chest when the wind wasn’t blowing. Stepping up onto an upturned apple crate decorated with the words ‘The Feather Speech’, I took my place as the newest ‘speaker’ at Speakers’ Corner.

Speakers’ Corner has the same diminished impression as meeting a celebrity – it’s much smaller and less distinctive in real life. The legendary space, known for hosting a history of free speeches, is just an ordinary bit of Hyde Park, edged by black railings, where joggers, commuters and tourists file past. But here, the twentieth-century feminist words of Christabel Pankhurst once hung in the air, along with speeches from George Orwell, Karl Marx and William Morris. Among other topics, women’s rights, the Spanish Civil War, communism and socialism have been passionately voiced here, and now here I was, about to make a five-minute speech . . . about birds.

Birds. Those feathered ancient creatures who witness our lives whether we notice them or not, so intertwined, so adapted, yet prehistoric. Archosaurs, they are the only remaining dinosaurs. Such a part of our daily lives, it would be unnerving to encounter a day without birds. Some live so close to us in the nooks and crannies of our walls, they sleep inches away from where we rest our heads.

In Britain, several birds nest in our buildings, including house sparrows, common starlings, house martins and common swifts. Each one is a beady-eyed companion living alongside us, reliant on nesting in our buildings to breed. For common swifts in Britain, this dependence is almost 100 per cent, with the exception of a small number who nest in the old Caledonian Forest in Scotland. Belonging to one of the most ancient orders of birds, swifts have existed, screaming their iconic screams, since Britain was a tropical shallow sea, their bloodline one of the longest in the avian world. About the same age as the Rocky Mountains, they evolved seven epochs ago in the Palaeogene period. For the 60 million years since, swifts have reigned the skies. One of their superpowers is to stay airborne for longer than any other bird on Earth. For nine months every year, they live in a single flight lasting around 6,500 hours, yet when they come home, they come home to us. Used to sleeping in the sky 18,000 feet up, above the clouds, the only ground swifts will ever intentionally know are the nesting holes in our buildings. Every year in August adult swifts leave our villages and towns, and fly to the Congo rainforests, following coastlines and crossing the Sahara, the largest desert on Earth. Every May, the same swifts return to Britain, right down to the exact nook they left nine months before. Able to live for twenty years, swifts often call our houses home longer than we do.

Historically, swifts bred in the high holes of trees in primal forests. When, in the seventeenth century, the diminishing forests of Britain and Europe, felled for timber and ships, disappeared, swifts adapted to nesting within man-made structures. Now they are on the brink of extinction, together with the other birds who share our walls, united in their plight by the loss of their nesting habitat. There are other factors contributing to their decline but if they can’t breed in Britain, they can’t exist here. This threat was what propelled me that naked day, trying not to shiver, standing on a box, speaking to a small audience made up of half supporters, half press.

My words rang out into the cold air: ‘I stand here as a gobetween for swifts to ask for your comradery because they need our help. Today I open a petition and invite you to sign it to make swift bricks compulsory in new housing across Britain. Together we can try to stop these remarkable British birds passing into legend . . .’

My voice was surprisingly steady and clear, loud enough to be heard but not quite a shout. Determined to learn my speech off by heart, I had been practising it, wearing just my pants, in a field near my house in Oxfordshire. My husband, Robin, had faithfully been my audience of one, holding a huge coat, ready to wrap me up to hide me from unsuspecting dog walkers. Now I was aware that Britain’s press was recording it all and I was half wondering whether one of my legs shaking uncontrollably would be picked up on film. I had no idea whether the photos would be printed and my campaign launch would engage the nation with the plight of our feathered neighbours in a desperate bid to save them.

My five-minute speech attempted to distil their existence, outlining why these birds need our help, and presenting the solution of a simple brick. Alongside external wooden swift nest boxes, ‘swift bricks’ were invented decades ago. A swift brick is a brick that sits flush to the wall with a deliberate cavity that provides a nesting site not just for swifts but for all other urban birds who nest in holes in our buildings. Sustainable, requiring zero maintenance and as cheap as £34, they have been proven to work well, implemented in Gibraltar in the 1990s where swift populations have stabilised as a result. Critically, without swift bricks, there is no guaranteed safe, permanent nesting habitat for swifts or any birds reliant on building cavities in Britain. They are the answer to loss of nesting habitat for all cavity-nesting urban birds, but in 2021 the RSPB estimated that fewer than 20,000 swift bricks had been installed by developers. A start, but nowhere near enough to counter the national-scale loss of natural cavities, especially when theoretically hundreds of thousands of swift bricks could be installed each year thanks to the government’s annual quota for new housing.

The speech was followed by a two-and-a-half-mile march. I walked under Wellington Arch, outside the gates of Buckingham Palace and down Birdcage Walk until I was next to the Cenotaph, the Houses of Parliament and finally Downing Street. The march that day, which happened to fall on Bonfire Night, was my tiny twenty-first-century version of outrage at the government’s inaction. Instead of trying to blow up the Houses of Parliament, I was simply trying to spark a national conversation to help birds.

As I walked, I distracted myself from the odd looks, reminding myself that The Feather Speech was an accumulation of many elements. It was months of consulting with expert ornithologists and thirty-six years of the sheer delight I felt on seeing the first swifts arriving home to Britain each May. But as I marched, eyes forward, trying to ignore the rain that fell harder and harder, wetting my hair so it stuck to my shoulders, one underlining thought was roaring in the back of my mind: How the hell had it come to this? Why was anyone having to do this for birds?

And how come it was me?

Chapter 1

Mayday

May, 2021

The grass is singing. I lie on my back among the fast-growing blades, the May sun warm on my face for the first time this year. Next to me, a grasshopper flings its green body onto mine, looking at me with a roving eye.

We loll in the sunshine.

It feels like a perfect encapsulation of the word ‘estivate’ – derived from the Latin word for summer, aestus – meaning ‘to spend summer in a torpid state’, a wonderful warm trance of being, but it’s not quite here yet. One crucial element is missing and we are lying in wait. The weather is just right: blue sky, bright sunshine and no wind over the landscape of green, studded with the white lace of cow parsley and hawthorn frothing along the hedgerows. When will they arrive? Hurtling effortlessly, soaring through the air, cascading over continents, they are coming, headed straight for where I am lying with the grasshopper. Any minute now, they will return all the way from Africa and bring the feeling of summer with them.

We scan the sky, ears ready to hear their screams.

Then we see one.

That unmistakable sickle shape, that black-feathered anchor, suddenly there in the patch of sky above us. The arrival summons a scream as I stagger up, jumping in the air with the grasshopper. ‘Welcome home!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!’ I cry, arching up towards the sky. The meadow and the grasshopper and I are laughing with joy. All over the country, other grown women and men were holding their breath, staring up in wait, leaping into the air too, crying, whooping, rejoicing as their feathered neighbours return. That is the effect of a single 45-gram bird, loved so much that Brits have collectively dubbed them our icons of summer: swifts.

An hour later I was pedalling my bike as fast as I could go, through the dappled light and lilac back lanes of Oxford, throwing it down in excited abandon as I arrived at the Museum of Natural History. The museum is an imposing Victorian neo-Gothic building on the inner edge of the city. Both its design and contents are shaped by the natural world. Under a glass roof with wrought ironwork and column capitals carved into plants representing all the botanical orders is a vast collection of millions of objects, including 30,000 zoological specimens. Among them is the only surviving soft tissue of a dodo in the world and the 195-million-year-old ichthyosaur discovered by Mary Anning in the nineteenth century. But within the museum, there are things that, to me, trump the whole collection: the swifts living in the tower.

Under the roof cowls in the tower there are 147 swift nests, the entrance holes visible from the lawn in front. The tower is home to a colony of swifts, studied by the Edward Grey Institute since 1948 in what is the world’s longest study of a single species of bird. I glanced up at the holes. Every May, the swifts arrive in waves, following isobars somewhere south of Europe, lurking where the insects are high up, until the weather gives clear passage. First the vanguards, then the adult pairs who reunite once back here, and finally the juveniles, who won’t land but return to prospect for their own future nesting sites. I rushed up the great stone steps, to find George Candelin waiting for me. George is special. He is the ‘Keeper of the Swifts’. Since 1995, every May he has embarked on a weekly monitoring of the colony, noting each bird, each egg, every chick and recording the precious new generation’s development as well as ringing them when they are old enough, all in the dark so as not to disturb the birds. I had contacted him to ask him about swifts and he invited me to visit the tower, quickly taking me under his wing, allowing me to bombard him with questions. He was naturally calm, measured and never overstated, but didn’t mind my high-energy enthusiasm.

Slipping through the discreet tower door, I followed George up the stone spiral staircase into a large room at the base of the tower. From there, up another spiral staircase into the dark tower, lit only by red lamps. I love this place. It is dark, quiet, still, like a great old ship that creaks in the wind, and it is full of swifts. Inside the tower there are three levels, with the nesting boxes on all four sides, but the southern-facing wall is almost empty of swifts who instinctively know the risk of summer sun overheating their chicks. Site loyal, each adult swift returns to the exact hole each year.

‘They’re back!’ George whispered as he opened the first flap of the first nest box.

‘Ah, my favourite,’ I said, in awe, gazing at her dark velvet body, her big eyes, closed in the first proper sleep she’d had since she had last been here. For the nine months between, she’d slept on the wing, shutting off half her brain at a time so she could rest but remain airborne. Now she was in a blissfully sheltered, dark bedroom.

‘She’s as good as new despite her long journey,’ I whispered.

‘Just being a swift, doing what swifts do,’ George said softly, careful not to humanise the birds, but I could hear in his voice he was smiling too.

We shuffled round the narrow walkways in the tower, George whispering swifts’ secrets as we moved around in the dark. My favourite was one that connects the colony to the city in which they live: a nest dotted with little bits of tiny round coloured paper.

‘Well, it’s May, isn’t it?’ George explained. ‘And during May, as the swifts return, university students are doing their exams. Traditionally, fellow students greet their friends outside the exam halls and celebrate by throwing confetti.’ He pointed to the dots of colour. ‘Little do they know that some of the confetti ends up in the tower as the swifts use it to build their nests.’

It was a wonderful thought. Swifts catch nest materials in the air: leaves, mown grass, scraps of tracing paper, rose petals, string, pigeon feathers and, in Oxford, confetti. Their beds, just like their homes in buildings, are interwoven with our own lives. The confetti had been thrown to celebrate the academic achievement of young minds who have the world at their feet. Now it was cradling eggs, marking the beginning of lives that would have the run of the sky.

‘But since they were last here, they’ve been added to the Red List of highest conservation concern, together with house martins,’ he said. ‘That’s seventy species of British birds on the Red List.’

‘Maybe being on the Red List will help them. Maybe the government will stop allowing the dousing of the countryside with chemicals killing all the insects, maybe fully engage and invest in nature restoration, and protect the birds’ nesting habitat,’ I said, clutching at the potential silver lining.

‘You mean, maybe the government will start caring?’ George replied. ‘British wildlife is condemned unless a lot of things change, otherwise there won’t be anything left and swifts are in the middle of it all, hit every which way. They’re poster children for biodiversity and they’re plummeting.’

‘Well, if the government won’t act, maybe I’ll make them,’ I said, my heart suddenly starting to beat hard in my chest.

‘How?’ George asked.

‘I have absolutely no idea,’ I replied.

My mind pocketed this threat to do something, making a small bulge of thought while summer grew around me as I walked through my village territory each day. Between where the grasshoppers hopped and my house, the meadow had built itself high in bursting colour. Thistles and foxgloves towered over me as I leaned into the flower heads, listening to the scrabble of bumblebee feet as they ventured into the petals. Down the single-track lane framed by stone cottages, little yellow domes of pineapple weed grew through the cracks, drenching the tarmac with their pineapple scent at footstep level. Every time I passed, I paused, crouching to breathe it in. Above me, the invisible lines of blackbird melody flowed back to my stone cottage, which stands unfortunately close to the A road that slices through the village like a guillotine. Despite the constant nearby death threat of cars, my small garden, tucked away behind the house, was full of life. Like a maquette of a meadow, it is a refuge that, left uncut and unhindered, is home to iridescent beetles, bright pink moths, and wrens who sing, gram for gram, ten times louder than a cockerel.

I liked knowing my home by the map of wild territories, instead of human. I didn’t know the name of my neighbour opposite who vacuumed up the dandelions on his buzz-cut lawn, but I had watched the colony of sparrows grow, living out their lives between his garden and mine, thanks to the tree he had decided to keep. When neighbours made their morning pilgrimage to the village shop, the rooks swirled above, whirling in a dance of voices to the fields that stretched out into the Cotswolds. During the summer, the swifts bound the landscape together, sleeping and nesting in the walls. My husband, Robin, would find me staring at gable ends in the village, trying to encourage me to walk on, knowing I was waiting to see if a swift would fly in or out of a hole under the eaves.

‘Doesn’t it just blow your mind?’ I said to him as a swift flew right above our heads, its speed fast enough to rush the air that made a sound in its wake. ‘They sleep here, right next to us, and then they make a journey to the Congo Basin – a place I’ve always dreamed of going – and they don’t land until they’re back here. Right there, in that little hole in this village nine months later?’

Robin smiled at my little speech, one I made at least once a week, gently dragging me away. He did love them, but partly because he loved me and I love birds.

Birds are not just feather and bone. They are go-betweens, shrinking the boundaries that separate wild and tame. All are connected to us, some existing so close that their lives are intertwined with ours. As a child, my parents nicknamed me Spadge after the sparrows and how wide-eyed they made me. As an adult, two individual birds redefined my life while living in the rural grasslands of Ghana. I rescued, hand raised and rewilded a finch whom I found abandoned after a storm blew down his grass nest. He spent hours weaving nests out of my hair, earnestly attacking the mole on my face and demanding the smallest of strokes under his tiny chin. After three months, the effort of spending every day in the grasslands with him so he could learn how to be wild paid off, and he rejoined his flock. The other bird was a swift, two weeks away from fledging, with eyes like polished planets. Raising the swift was intense, hunting insects for it, knowing it had to be a precise weight and size before it could fly. Every time I fed the swift, I was awestruck by the fallen feathered star in the palm of my hand. But the close-up view of the bird was jarring. I had only ever seen swifts diving and spiralling over the roofs in fluid motion above me. These two birds are two pieces of the wild who connected me to the rest of it, who broke down the concept of ‘nature’ and ‘wildlife’ into hearts that beat alongside mine. Only when I returned to England from Africa did I learn the nightmare unfolding on my doorstep: that beating wild hearts were stopping, one after the other, in their millions. Threatened with extinction, the swifts’ screams turned into cries for help.

Since George had told me swifts and house martins had been added to the Red List, I had not skewered the mounting feeling of dread and concern into a tangible plan. I was used to assuming someone else with more expertise and authority would do something, or that perhaps nothing could be done so there was no point in tearing myself apart worrying about all the ways in which we were destroying the natural world and the systems that keep us alive. In contrast, one wild creature suffering is impossible for me to ignore. I am the person who will harbour a fly caught on a train until I can safely release it, scoop drowning insects from puddles, move snails off the path and turn my whole life upside down if a creature needs my help. On my honeymoon, I tucked an injured bird into my bra and delivered it to a rehab centre. Last winter, I found a hypothermic wood mouse on the road, put him in my glove and housed him over the cold snap. Within a month of moving back to England, Robin’s and my life revolved around crows.

On a cold March morning, we found a small black mass lying in a frosted field near the house, bouncing away, unable to fly. Grounded, the crow flung itself into the air, trying desperately to launch. Each time it tumbled down quickly in a small, frustrated, frightened ball of black feathers. Robin caught the bird while two other crows tried hard to protect it, launching diving attacks, cawing their haunting cries. Smaller than them but almost fully grown, the disabled bird was a yearling, so we guessed the two others were its parents. Crows are famously loyal, and from the parents’ point of view we were kidnapping their child, wrenching it from its family and holding it hostage.

Back home, I held the crow in my hands and felt for breaks in its bones but there were none. The damage was on the outside, the feathers ripped, possibly a victim of a Larsen trap, where gamekeepers deliberately cut corvids’ feathers to use them as live decoys, knowing their loyal family will try to rescue them, making them easy targets to shoot. Many of the young bird’s wing feathers and tail were missing, leaving it unable to fly, but its eyes were burning bright. Its stare was sure – this was a bird that was trying to live.

We didn’t know whether we would look after the crow until it grew new feathers and could be released somehow or whether we would have a pet crow until we were in our sixties.

‘I think we should name it,’ Robin said. ‘We might have it for decades.’ Convinced she was a female, we called her Constance, which derives from Latin ‘to stand with’. The name went beyond the surface commitment we made. It was linked to principle. Despite the natural habitat and food sources decreasing, crows have successfully adapted to our changes, moving into urban areas that we consider ours. Crows plan ahead, hiding food in caches in nooks and crannies, saving for a day when food is scarce. They work together to mob predators and are highly territorial, protecting their families, known as a ‘murder’. This collective noun feels harsh, negatively steeped in human history: on our past bloody battlefields, near our medieval hospitals and at our gallows sites, crows were regular visitors, seen picking apart the dead. This association wove superstitions and folklore into the perceived lives of crows, people not seeing their part in the scenes, not understanding crows to be useful rubbish collectors, cleaning away scraps that would otherwise spread disease. Because of this mislabelled encroachment on ‘our’ land, these birds are considered a pest: vermin, a collective noun and generalised label on anything that humans consider inconvenient, often leading to their painful demise. We have defined this living, breathing creature by how it negatively impacts us, not for its own inherent qualities.

Constance was mesmerising mostly because she was clearly actively thinking. Suspicious to start with, she had to be force-fed, which she hated, crouching, her feathers flattened, hissing at me. Gradually we got into a routine that, although it worked, was bizarre. If I offered her a ramekin of mince and live mealworms, standing with my head down, eyes low, face down as though I was bowing to a goddess, she began to eat. She would snap the worms from the ramekin I held in my outstretched hand. This became our dynamic: we held her captive but she dictated the rules.

Until her feathers moulted and regrew she couldn’t fly, and only when she could would she be free. The timescale for this process was at least one season, maybe more. A guilt attached itself to me immediately, as I sat with Constance. I knew she was lonely but I would never be enough. Crows need crows. Eventually, after weeks of searching, we found her company. In the end we fostered five crows, the other four having been rescued by a corvid sanctuary and, for various reasons, also needing long rehab to allow their feathers to grow.

The little murder lived in our shed for two years until all became strong enough to return to the wild, finally free. This was a huge commitment. Robin and I couldn’t leave our house for more than one night together because the crows would be spooked by someone else coming to feed them and change their water or check on them in any way. While we deliberately didn’t try to tame them, for the weeks Constance had been alone, we had played catch with her. It was Robin who had discovered this was possible. Using a cork tied onto a piece of rope, he had swung the cork towards her and she would snatch it. Then, with force, tilting her head back, she threw it back. We played it with her regularly, and in return Constance had taught me a lesson that resonated through how she looked at me. Intelligent and disdainful, Constance’s stare was intense. When I looked at her, she looked away, unconfrontational, afraid, but as soon as I moved my glance, I could see her fixing her eyes back to me. I could feel her stare. Occasionally our eyes would meet and I would see the faint difference between her pupils and her iris, the colour of her eyes not black but brown, just like her feathers were tinted with a glimmering iridescent navy in sunlight. She was a wealth of secrets, of life waiting to be lived. But most of all, she was an active consciousness staring at me, wanting to know what was happening and what I was doing about it.

Looking into the eyes of a wild creature, rendered helpless because of human hands, felt like looking into a stark, brutal mirror of truth. There was no hiding or skirting around the facts, finding excuses, displacing blame. There was no bullshit. In her dark, piercing eyes, all crows were represented, and through the crows, all birds and all wildlife. She was precious, not only because she was unique, but on principle. Constance represented the adaptable, resilient wild that was being crippled and destroyed by us. As she tried to fly, flapping her shredded wings, wobbling as she lost her balance, she gave me both responsibility and power to rectify her life. A life that disliked me and everything I stood for, and this felt honest because Constance was wild, her stare holding me accountable for being human.

Chapter 2

The Promise

The swifts spurred me on to get to know some of the people in the area. In a nearby village, there was an active wildlife group with posters going up for talks and events that led me to a local Swift Conservation Society. I arrived in the village hall for their first meeting of the year. The three retired women who had started it were full of gumption. In her soft Scottish accent, Sylvia opened the meeting, addressing the small crowd of all ages in the room.

‘We have gathered because the swifts have started to arrive here in Oxfordshire and across the country. With this joy comes a nightmare. As you all know too well, many swifts will return after their perilous journeys to find their homes in people’s walls and roofs blocked off by soffits, reroofing, repointing or demolition. It is our job to try to ensure their homes are protected, unblocked, or that nest boxes are erected as quickly as possible.’

The other two founders, Margaret and Julie, nodded in agreement.

Sylvia continued. ‘For any newcomers, let’s remind ourselves what happens when some unfortunate swifts return.’

‘The poor buggers fly at the wall over and over, trying to get into their home until they often break their wings or necks and die,’ Margaret added, her voice clipped with anger.

‘Yes. Indeed. The “poor buggers”,’ Sylvia said. ‘Swifts return to the same nook or cranny year on year which, considering they can live to be over twenty, makes them long-standing members of our community.’

The small crowd nodded as she carried on. ‘We are here to help. Some don’t die but get gravely injured, needing intensive care. Many give up, and then with decreasing nesting options, struggle to find new sites in time to breed. So, we have made swift business our business.’ Sylvia paused, letting the information sink in to those new to the group, staring over her spectacles.

‘Please familiarise yourselves with the rota so you know when you’re on call. You know the drill: if you see swifts trying to get into a blocked nesting site or scaffolding being erected, knock on the door, and politely explain to the occupant. Resist raising your voice. We don’t want to get ourselves a reputation for bullying.’

‘They’ll think we’re missionaries!’ Margaret said.

‘Someone thought I was a Jehovah’s Witness last season,’ a teenager replied, giggling.

‘If they decline to help, you can explain that blocking an active nesting site breaches the Wildlife and Countryside Act and is therefore a wildlife crime. Problem is, to enforce it, a wildlife crime officer or the police have to firstly be available, and secondly, be willing to follow through, which doesn’t always happen and then there is not much we can do, so use all the skills you possess, please. Charm, wits, what God gave you,’ Sylvia added.

Margaret made a lewd expression and gestured to her bosom, which was a surprise given she was a seventy-year-old wearing a mauve cagoule.

‘This is a matter of life and death, but we do need to operate with decorum,’ Sylvia said in response to the high-spirited conversations that had begun to fill the room, raising her hands to quieten us down.

‘If you see swifts trying to get into blocked nesting sites, send a message to the group with the words “code red”, with the location,’ Sylvia said, ending the meeting.

And so the summer started, and with it, all across the country, volunteer-led swift conservation groups began their local campaigns to protect their local swifts. One hundred and nineteen small groups and counting were part of the Swifts Local Network (SLN), a collection of people and groups actively raising awareness about these birds, trying to protect swifts from building changes. Founded by dedicated leaders of different swift groups around the UK, the SLN was formed in 2017 to enable everyone to keep connected and for new people like me to learn from those who had spent years committed to swift and house martin conservation. Linked to Action for Swifts, a resource created by Dick Newall to enable people to help swifts, there was an abundance of supportive information available.

I joined the SLN and was instantly plugged into an evening digest email that circulated news. Through the SLN I found out about the extent of effort across the country: groups such as Bolton and Bury Swifts, led by Louise Bentley, and Wolverton Swifts, led by Emma Rix, raise awareness locally. A builder from Kent with a soft spot for swifts, Nik Mitchell, has set up a club trying to change the culture of tradesmen in his area to look out for wildlife. Paul Wren, a builder in Oxfordshire, spends every spare hour going from village to village, keeping a watchful guard over existing nest sites and putting up swift boxes, for free. Helen Lucy paints beautiful pamphlets, delivering them to developers and councils asking them to install swift bricks and boxes. Graham Knight spends his spare time contacting local developers and councils, protecting nesting sites across Hertfordshire. Volunteers check for grounded birds, who either need just a helping hand to return them to the sky or full-time intensive care. Groups coordinating taxi services for grounded swifts operate all over the country, to ensure each patient gets to a rehabber in time. Volunteers rehab those swifts who survive, dedicating whole summers to care for them, falling in love with each one, their lives revolving around theirs until they release them into the sky.

Sheffield Swift Network, a fiercely loyal group, has successfully saved whole colonies of swifts from being displaced. One of their leaders is Chet Cunago, who leaps to the swifts’ defence whenever scaffolding goes up in the area, knowing renovations risk blocking swift homes. She made the national news when she safeguarded one colony in Sheffield after frantic calls to the council that managed to get scaffold boards removed. Assembling a band of volunteers, they searched for overlooked swift nests in all the council houses scheduled for renovation in the area. The more they looked, the more they noticed the extent of the threat of renovations for swifts, surveying 1,500 council homes.

Chris Swaine, who set up Wakefield Swifts, protects existing nesting sites through collaborative innovation. Wakefield has a large number of social houses and pit houses, built post-war, that now belong to Wakefield Council, run by Wakefield District Housing (WDH). Wakefield’s swifts favour these buildings, so whole colonies reside in lines of council houses. Reroofing had led to the destruction of several colonies in one afternoon, an action repeated all over the county. When Chris and the Wakefield group found out, they reacted, managing to hold an emergency conference call with the sustainability manager. Passionately explaining the need to help the swifts by saving the nesting sites scheduled to be blocked by further reroofing projects, the group proposed a solution of cutting small holes in the soffits to unblock each swift home and supplying wooden concave nests. The WDH agreed, inspired by Chris. Thanks to citizen science, love and a practical solution, as the WDH have reroofed, they continue to install and leave little holes for the birds, protecting and mitigating hundreds of swift homes.

Witnessing swifts trying to get into their blocked homes is the main motivating factor for the members of the SLN, because to see it just once is to have the horror etched on your mind forever. I had been innocently walking round my village when I first saw it happen. It was early May and a swift whooshed right past my head on a flight path into its home, perhaps returning for the first time that season. I expected the bird to shoot through the hole and disappear, but instead it hit the stone wall and managed to correct itself, faltering, clutching to the wall. Its claws, the same colour and sheen as pencil lead, kept it there while it peered up and down. Then it sprung off the stone wall and flew back along its invisible flight path, hurtling past my head. I spun around, keeping my eyes on it as it circled back round and flew at the wall again. I braced myself for the collision, although fortunately this one carefully clung once more, looking again, as if perplexed. It had left here last August after having gone in and out of its home countless times, knowing exactly how to curve past the other rooftops and the telephone wires.

There was nothing I could do in the moment but to stand there, filling up with a wretched sense of numbed horror. I desperately knocked on the door of the house, but no one was in. I scrawled a note begging for the hole to be unblocked, pushing it through the letterbox. A day later I got the number of the owner and rang it, feeling awkward before they answered. They agreed to unblock the hole, the man coming the following evening, but it was too late. The swift had gone, nowhere to be seen. I watched the hole for days, but no swift returned. That single nest wasn’t just important for the pair of swifts who were anticipating a proper rest after nine months in the sky, reuniting at home, but because as a breeding pair they could create two or even three more swifts, from egg to flying machines in just six weeks. While two or three chicks might not sound like very many, each of those birds could also go on to have two or three chicks every year; the potential lost in a line of ghosts. It was a bitter lesson of how wild lives can be compromised or ruined by the small, ordinary decisions we make, often without us even knowing, and it happens all across the country, every May.

This awareness mounted thanks to the SLN, but it was the heatwave that turned me into a campaigner, summoned by the flames that burned 19 July 2022 into the record books as the hottest day noted in Britain. The day was captured in headlines like it was straight from hell: ‘Tinderbox Britain’; ‘Wildfires destroy houses’; ‘Day of 40°C shocks scientists’; ‘Fields and buildings ablaze on the outskirts of London’. For a few days, Britain lived a nightmare that we had been warned about for decades. After months without rain, the days had steadily got hotter, the Met Office issuing its first-ever extreme heat warning.

In my village, some of the farmland I walked in every day was licked by flames. Tractors sped down the main road to the fields, the brave and desperate farmers attempting to put fires out by driving head on into them. Apart from the sirens and the line of fire on the outskirts of the village, there was no movement or sound. It was eerie, a sudden ghost town, as people hid from the sun. I stood in the empty road, recognising that I was witnessing a turning point, a historic shift in the wrong direction. People remembered where they were when JFK was shot, I remembered where I was at the news of Princess Diana’s death and when the twin towers were hit on 9/11, and I knew as I stood on the road, I would never forget 19 July 2022. Stuck to the spot in a silent village edged in flames, I witnessed the sun bringing climate change to my doorstep. The sirens of the fire engines were the embodiment of the alarms whistle-blowers had been sounding for decades. It was as though we were being shaken violently awake. I could decide to return to my house and stand with my fridge door open, sucking an ice lolly, or I could do something. This was the decisive moment. The emergency situation justified me to do something that I had been gearing up to do for a while: panic. The idle game, ‘if your house was on fire, what would you save?’ became a question on a loop in my mind, extended to the village territory. The answer was conjured by the strongest instinct we all possess: the instinct to protect what we love. And what I love, more than anything, are birds.

Within half an hour of standing in numb panic on the road, I was walking down a hedgerow having ransacked my cupboards of oven dishes so I could create makeshift water stations for the birds and other creatures whose small paws and feet would struggle to get anywhere near the river. This small act went against what I had been taught to believe: that we should let wild things be wild, that human intervention was silly, unnecessary and wrong. This stance had been ingrained in me as a West Country girl surrounded by farming relatives. The attitude was a mixture of British stiff upper lip and practicality, where caring was tutted away as being sentimental, costly, a waste of time or counterproductive, to the point where even suggesting doing something differently in the countryside seemed very much out of bounds. I knew truths now that countered that traditional dismissal. It might seem like a small thing to do – to provide water to creatures who were thirsty – but under the extreme circumstances of the heatwave and the undisputable destruction of habitats on a national scale, it was necessary. According to the charity Froglife, 70 per cent of small bodies of water in the British countryside have disappeared in the last fifty years thanks to being filled in or because they’ve dried up.

One blackbird didn’t even wait until I had left, rushing to the water to take long sips as I watched from a metre away. Then the others came. A dozen yellowhammers and chaffinches splashed into the water dishes. Some sat down, while others shimmied and all of them drank. I sighed at their obvious relief, acknowledging I would have to return with more water and bigger dishes and, once the ground wasn’t rock hard, seek permission to dig a pond.

By the afternoon, I walked past a neighbour’s to discover newly erected scaffolding was blocking swifts getting in and out of their home and accessing their young. I knocked on the door and explained the situation, politely asking for just the top of the scaffold to be removed immediately.

‘But can’t they just get round the pole like other birds?’ the neighbour replied.

‘No. They’re not like other birds. They can’t perch or hop – they whizz in and out and need a clear flight path to do it, like a Spitfire taking off,’ I said, trying to hold my cool, realising it wasn’t dissimilar to a hostage situation. If the scaffold wasn’t removed at the top under the eaves where the nests were, the chicks would die, starving to death while their parents were rendered helpless, but I could not lead with anger or judgement. I had to be polite and friendly; after all, the man had only inadvertently blocked them. He had no idea he even had swifts nesting in his eaves and his response was completely reasonable.

‘It was a real pain to put up,’ he said, ‘so I think I shall just let nature take its course.’

‘I bet it was in this heat, but the thing is, it’s not nature taking its course – it’s actually a wildlife crime.’

The neighbour buckled at the word ‘crime’ and changed his mind.

As I thanked him profusely, in under five minutes, the man had removed the top poles, agreeing to put them back once the swifts had gone. Almost immediately, the swifts returned to their nesting hole, arriving with mouths full of insects. The neighbour was gobsmacked as he watched the birds disappear into his wall.

I stayed there, watching too. In the silence of the day, I heard the faint winnowing of the chicks as the parents fed them, their family life rectified in an instant, but only because I had happened to pass by. Only because I knew. Only because I had the nerve to bother the homeowner and only because the homeowner had agreed. For many swifts, scaffolding would block them from their chicks, the law unknown or ignored, or their homes would be blocked when they were on migration, perfectly legally. I stared up at the hole, the faces of the two chicks just peeping out. Given half a chance, these chicks would go from being quiet and unmoving to suddenly living in the sky for up to three years before they touched ground again. As I looked at their little faces, everything changed.

Until that moment, although I had made long-term commitments to help individual birds, the seed of political action lay underneath the surface, dormant even, as I became increasingly aware of biodiversity loss. The term ‘biodiversity’ happened to be coined the month I was born – September 1986 – for the very reason of communicating the collective and increasing decline of the natural world, thanks to us, the new kids on the block. The Biodiversity Forum, co-created by the leading American conservation scientist E. O. Wilson, was launched to bring attention to ‘a most urgent, global problem: the rapidly accelerating loss of plant and animal species’. Twenty years later, in 2006, he together with scientists across the world were declaring the first stages of the sixth mass-extinction event, caused solely as the result of human activity. Ever since, the statistics have got worse. Globally, according to the United Nations, 1 million species face extinction. The most critically endangered species on Earth that hasn’t gone extinct yet is the Javan rhino with only sixty-seven currently remaining, who live with a 24/7 armed guard. Another rhinoceros – the western black rhino – became extinct in 2011 along with millions more lost forever, each year the list growing. Gone. Closer to home, our seemingly ordinary animals are perishing too. Biodiversity loss is happening right on our British doorstep. The UK has destroyed more biodiversity than any of the other G7 countries, making our ‘green and pleasant land’ one of the most nature-deprived corners of the world.