For my last birthday I got a box. My girlfriend bought me a swift box which, between working away from home and the lack of a long enough ladder, I didn’t manage to put up, so in the summer (already too late) I attached some tabs to it and sat it on an upstairs window ledge. No swifts moved in, but months later when I went to move it I found a pipistrelle had taken up residence underneath it (apparently this is very common). So the swift box remains where it was.
I count myself extremely fortunate to be surrounded by amazing wildlife in North Yorkshire, especially that of an airborne variety. But I’d love to encourage more. The swifts stayed away but some house martins found my 17th-century gentry house sufficiently des res: I had two nests in the corners of upstairs windows, and one underneath the stone portico above the kitchen door. Happily, all three nests successfully fledged.
A barn owl and a kestrel regularly hunt around the 2-acre garden, and there are several woodpeckers, and an abundance of tits. The house sits in an important nesting spot for curlews: my neighbours on Lawkland Hall farm had four nests last year, two of which had happy endings. I’ve recently started doing a few bits with the snappily titled Clapham Curlew Cluster, a local group of bird-loving volunteers.
Human success over the centuries has come at the expense of countless wild species. First we cleared the landscape for crops and livestock, then those small fields with habitat-rich boundaries (hedges, rough verges, even stone walls) made way for big agriculture. The widespread use of chemical insecticides has caused a huge fall in insect numbers, birds’ primary food.
Changes in architectural fashion — not least, a proliferation of shiny glass boxes — have also diminished nesting sites, as have conversions of barns and other buildings. The numbers of UK bird species are declining, by about 16 per cent overall since 1970, but some species, particularly those associated with farmland, are hit harder. House sparrow numbers in the UK have declined by nearly 71 per cent since 1977, and across Europe the number of house sparrows fell by 247mn between 1980 and 2017, according to a 2021 study by the RSPB, BirdLife International and the Czech Society for Ornithology. The RSPB also says the UK’s starling populations have fallen by about two-thirds since the 1970s.
Humans have been sticking up structures to house birds since Egyptian times, largely because they wanted to eat them. It was not until the late 18th century that German naturalist Sittich Hans von Berlepsch popularised them for their current less culinary purpose to protect the bird and its offspring from predators and the weather. Different birds need different-sized and shaped boxes and entrances, closely matched to the nest sites they’re used to (under pan tiles in Norfolk, behind barge boards in Worcestershire etc).
My swift box came from a small workshop in Derbyshire called Peak Boxes, run by Lester Hartmann. Hartmann had been a bespoke joiner when a Peak District businessman named John Ellicock asked him to build a few barn owl and kestrel boxes back in 2018. He did such a good job that Ellicock asked him for 30 boxes for swifts; the following year he handmade 340 bird boxes, set up a stall at BirdFair (another one for my diary) and won Best in Show.
Hartmann’s are the Rolls-Royce of bird boxes. He invented a brilliant system for attaching them using a portable mounting plate that the box hooks over. No more dangling from a ladder 4 metres high, juggling a heavy box and screwdriver — I had each of my boxes up in less than five minutes. The mounting plates for his swift boxes can be replaced with a “bat back” and every box comes with a few feathers inside to make the birds feel at home. He paints black circles to look like holes (the birds are looking for holes to nest in, not wooden boxes), and coats the roofs with heat-reflective paint because we don’t want roasted swift or barn owl. They even sell little speakers to play swift noises to help encourage them into the neighbourhood.
Peak Box’s tally now stands at more than 20,000 nesting compartments, and Hartmann recently completed 350 boxes for a 30-mile corridor (funded by Defra) from Hathersage to Buxton, for owls and kestrels. It’s already at almost 40 per cent occupancy, with barn owls seen in areas where they hadn’t been recorded for a decade.
There is more good news for British birdlife: the numbers of blackcap, chiffchaff, blackbird, wren, goldfinch, robin, wood pigeon and blue tit have increased since the 1980s. And the population of 11 species of birds of prey have doubled in the same period, benefiting from increased protection, reduced use of pesticides and restoration programmes, although the numbers are still lower than they should be.
Lester let me bash together a bat box, and I bought a couple of house martin boxes, a barn owl duplex and a kestrel box. With the swift box from last year, I added a few extras from my local garden centre, Lay of the Land, in Settle, (whose boxes are made just up the road in Selside by a man called Peter). Most birds like an open flight path into their nest, and the owls and kestrels like to be between 3m and 4m from the ground, so we spent a while balancing at the top of a long ladder imagining being a birdy. The bat lodge is up and the house martin boxes will go up too when I see which of the real nests survive the winter’s gales. It’s going to be a paradise of birds come the summer.
Stick up more nest boxes, folks. Build your own (the RSPB has lots of helpful “how to” videos) or, if time or skill doesn’t permit, buy them from someone who makes them local to you. Lay off the insecticides. Plant more things that provide food and useful cover (they love ivy) for the birds (I didn’t pick my elderflowers and berries this year so they would have more grub in the winter).
Then buy yourself some binoculars, sit back and enjoy the show.
‘The Windhover’ by Gerard Manley Hopkins
To Christ our Lord
I caught this morning morning’s minion, king-
dom of daylight’s dauphin, dapple-dawn-drawn Falcon, in his riding
Of the rolling level underneath him steady air, and striding
High there, how he rung upon the rein of a wimpling wing
In his ecstasy! then off, off forth on swing,
As a skate’s heel sweeps smooth on a bow-bend: the hurl and gliding
Rebuffed the big wind. My heart in hiding
Stirred for a bird, — the achieve of, the mastery of the thing!
Brute beauty and valour and act, oh, air, pride, plume, here
Buckle! AND the fire that breaks from thee then, a billion
Times told lovelier, more dangerous, O my chevalier!
No wonder of it: shéer plód makes plough down sillion
Shine, and blue-bleak embers, ah my dear,
Fall, gall themselves, and gash gold-vermilion.
Patrick Grant is the founder of Community Clothing, a judge on BBC television’s “The Great British Sewing Bee” and author of “Less” (HarperCollins)
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