Talk: ‘A year in the life of swifts’

LOOK no feet! Apus Apus the Common swift, eats, drinks, mates, preens and sleeps (half its brain awake and half asleep) on the wing. This gave rise the old belief that Swifts had no legs or feet. Thus the family name for all swifts, Apodidae, “footless”. Swifts, of course, have feet but land on them only when they enter their nesting site, lay eggs and rear their chicks. The rest of the time, sometimes for three continuous years, they are on the wing. A swift that lives 18 years may cover 4 million miles.

Linda Jenkinson of Start Birding, who runs the Leeds Swifts project with Martin Calvert, treated us to a wonderful, insightful presentation of the life of swifts with especial reference to their worrying decline (53% between 1995 and 2015) and the abnormal year they had in 2020. Part of the Leeds project is to put nesting boxes complete with video and MP3 players under roof spaces on houses allowing intimate observation of life inside a nesting box. We witnessed an angry male evicting a rival male and chicks doing press-ups (head and tails up and chests pushed against the wall of the box) to strengthen their pectoral muscles before fledging. Modern building methods of hermetically sealing off suitable under the eaves nesting spaces have impacted very negatively on swifts and partly accounts for their decline. Others factors being massive loss of insects due to pesticides and clearance of insect friendly areas, and in 2020, inclement weather.

A most fascinating part of Linda’s talk was about her role as foster mother to the many wounded chicks she has rescued and hand reared in her bedroom cum nursery. The chicks need feeding every 40 minutes on special food and are difficult to feed as, unlike the house martins she has also reared, swift chicks do not gape to receive food so Linda has to open their beaks very gently to push the food in. Linda shared delightful photos of her babies, peeping over their boxes, making eye contact with her as they follow her every movement.

How does she know when they are ready to leave her care and be set free? Firstly, their behaviour changes. They no longer make eye contact but stare straight ahead, refuse food and scrabble around restlessly in their boxes. They also need to be weighed and measured. A chick needs to weigh about 42/43 grams before it can be released. Finally comes that heart warming moment when the chick is set free to commence its life on the wing.

To learn more about Linda and Martin’s work contact leeds.swifts@gmail.com. Their future plans include learning more about swift migration, liaising with councils and building projects to provide suitable nesting spaces and general data collection.

The next meeting on March 9th presented by BTO David White and Rob Jacques is|: 25 Years of Garden BirdWatch