Swifts are fascinating and ancient creatures who travel 16,000 miles a year from where they nest in Scotland, to the Congo/Zaire Rainforest and back, without landing. They are the size of a cream egg and sleep, eat and bathe in the sky! Swifts evolved 60 million years ago but their numbers have declined by 58 % between 1995-2016. Earlier this month they were added up the UK Red List of highest conservation priority.
As part of RSPB Edinburgh Swift Cities Project, we aimed to create a sanctuary for swifts over the past year. With the help of over 250 local residents and 25 community groups in Edinburgh and beyond, we have installed or supported the installation of 187 swift nest boxes or bricks, added 515 surveys to Swift Mapper and carried out important research into their feeding behaviour. This will have an immense impact of the local and global population of swifts, and we wanted to continue to keep swifts on the agenda throughout COP26.
With the remainder of our funding from ScottishPower Foundation, we donated 26 swift nest boxes to community groups in Glasgow and Edinburgh. We ran talks or workshops about the swifts for the groups that received the boxes. We also created a wildflower meadow in the Hermitage of Braid with their Friends of group. Wildflowers support the flying insect population, a food source for swifts.
Thank you to the fantastic folk who agreed to put up the swift nest boxes on their buildings and support this work to happen. Here is a summary of the different groups.
Pesticide-Free Balerno have been working diligently over the past few years to halt the use of pesticides in their area by manually removing weeds along their streets. This supports the local flying insect population to thrive, which is the food source for the swifts. Fabulous effort by local resident Annie and her fantastic group of motivated volunteers pictured above.
Stockbridge Parish Church and St. Columba’s by the Castle become the 3rd and 4th swift supporting churches in Edinburgh, along with St Marys Cathedral and Ss Ninian And Triduana earlier in the year. These churches will host swift nest boxes either under their roof eaves, or inside their belfry tour. We dearly hope more churches across the city may be inspired by these actions, as part of their Eco-congregations Award.
The University of Edinburgh Veterinary Campus in Midlothian and Bellfield Community Hub in Portobello also received nest boxes. Meadowbank ‘Swift Street’ received a few nest boxes, to compliment their active community who have put up swift nest boxes, left weeds to grow or manually remove them, and grown many wildflowers in their gardens. Meadowbank are one of three swift streets in Edinburgh, as well as Abbeyhill colonies and Ratho.
Finally, we visited St Patricks Primary School P7s in Glasgow to learn about swifts. This extended the excellent work they’ve been doing on the run up to COP26. We are very grateful to the Salvation Army who will host the nest boxes and to Nourish Scotland for coordinating this to happen!
To finish off the project we hosted a ‘Building for Biodiversity – swift friendly infrastructure’ training event. This was aimed at tradespeople particularly roofing, construction, guttering, scaffolding and chimney services, housing developers and planning departments in city councils or conservation organisations. We learnt about swifts, their ecology and decline, and how to incorporate swifts into development and upkeep of buildings. We heard from RSPB, Edinburgh City Council, Barratts Housing Developments, National Federation of Roofing Companies (NFRC), Saltire Roofing & Construction and Donelly-O’Neill Architects Ltd.