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 was born.
Vivien sourced some nest boxes and cups, with the help of ‘Devon Birds’ and set about promoting the idea to the town. A year later we moved to Chulmleigh, my husband Chris and I saw a piece in the local newsletter asking if anyone was willing to put these up on their homes. We answered the call and met Vivien and were hooked. The Chumleigh project grew from one to three!
We promoted ourselves with a stand at the local fair and were pleasantly surprised with the response we received, there was a lot of interest and people signed up for boxes and nest cups and joined our email network, on which we could update house martin & swift fans and encourage them to report their sightings and nest sites to us. All our knowledge is self -taught, we read books, articles and attend presentations, and learn much from our own observations too!
We also use a community newsletter to keep people in the local area informed on the number of birds sighted & monitored, we actively go out and count the number of nest sites and get a great response from locals asking whether they have house martins (swifts and swallows) nesting on or around their properties. We do evening walks around the town to monitor and count the population, explaining to the residents what we are doing…as we may look a little strange looking at their houses with binoculars!
Once we starting monitoring these birds, we knew we would have to devise a way to deal with all the data we collected from our observations.
Chris does a fabulous job of marking Chumleighs’ nesting population on a town map.
This was the ‘monitoring map’ for 2024, the blue dots show the nesting house martins (and the red the swifts) these incorporate natural nests and nest cups. We had 23 nesting pairs of house martins this year and these are the ones we can see and have been told about. As you can see there are lots of notes taken over the months these wonderful birds are with us, and as we know house martin’s often have 2 broods, we note the date and times we confirm active nests. At times through the summer we saw 50+ house martins flying over the town. At the end of the season we split this into 2 maps for presentation purposes.
We have created window stickers and handed them to residents who have active nests and they have been delighted and there are now many displayed in the windows of Chulmleigh.
Pictured is one of the nest cups provided by Chulmleigh Swift and House Martin Conservation Project and for the second year running both cups were in use.
Starting up a project is not the hardest part, after all watching these joyful birds is a privilege, it’s getting others involved. It takes perseverance but if you are passionate about helping these red-list endangered birds, you may become known as the ‘bird people’, ‘swift’ or ‘HM people’ but we think that’s not a bad thing! We are now often stopped when we are out observing and asked information, even by tourists!
We liaise with other groups in other towns and have even done an evening presentation for them.
Our advice is to go out and attend any local talks about these birds and you will be pleasantly surprised how many other passionate people are out there eager to get involved.
chulmleighswiftsproject@gmail.com
