Chulmleigh is a small, rural hilltop town in North Devon. Chulmleighs’ Swift and House Martin Conservation Project was started by a local lady named ‘Vivien’, an avid bird watcher, during the pandemic. It gave her the opportunity to devote time to helping save these endangered birds, their habitats and nesting areas. And so, the project...

Once there were many house martins that nested under the eaves of the Sea Mills Station building and also on houses along the street. For various reasons there was a drastic decline in numbers until we only had two pairs breed here successfully in 2023. We observed the birds trying to build and then abandon...

Swift bricks are becoming more common in planning conditions, ecology reports and Local Plans, with some local authorities such as Brighton & Hove requiring swift bricks in almost all suitable new developments awarded planning permission. However, artificial nest cups (ANCs) are still a rarity, and there are a few reasons for this which I’ll explain...

Last year our swift group purchased some nest cups from Paul Stevens, to try and boost some of our local house martin colonies. We were delighted to hear from Paul Gorton north of Bury that the birds on his house had their best season in years! Paul told us that in the two natural nests,...

My name is Joel Ashton and I’ve been designing and installing gardens and habitats for wildlife for almost 20 years. My career has been a natural transition into habitat creation since having a passion for wildlife from a young age. After having helped a colony of house martins go from one to 14 breeding pairs...

Where do House Martins go for winter? Summary This trawl through the literature reveals that ringing returns are few and far between, that experiments with physical geo-locators ten years ago was abandoned, and that the most reliable evidence comes from analysing feathers for their isotopes that now roughly pin-point areas in sub-Saharan Africa where they...

Declining passage of House Martins The passage of House Martins (HM) seems to have tailed off dramatically in this part of the Cévennes mountains (St Martial, 30440, Gard). This is not too far from the Department of Herault (34) which borders the Mediterranean. In previous years exhausted HMs arrived between 14-26 August, but none at...

2022/23 (Phase 1) Summary by Sue and Tony Farley Some of you will already know that the Bentley Wood Wildlife Buffer Zone group was set up in 2022 and now consists of almost 200 people, living in villages surrounding Bentley Wood SSSI in south-east Wiltshire, who want to create a nature-friendly buffer zone around the...

Artificial nest sites, which of course includes nestboxes, have become a feature of British gardens, woodlands and nature reserves in the last 40 to 50 years, even diversifying into special “walls” for Sand Martins, concrete riverbank tunnels for Kingfishers and even Osprey nest platforms. Centuries earlier, the First Nation peoples of North America and Canada...

It’s early October and the evening skies above our house are unusually quiet and devoid of movement. A week ago ’our’ colony of house martins were feeding low over neighbouring grass fields and lined up on wires above waiting for the wind to swing round. In previous years the majority left around the autumn equinox...