Westminster Abbey’s quest to save swifts

Anglo-Saxon London – or Lundenwic as it was known – was a much quieter place than the modern metropolis the capital is today, with a population of just 5-10,000 people.

In 960, when Benedictine monks founded Westminster Abbey, they would have clearly heard the scream of swifts each summer.

These unique birds, which live mostly in eternal flight – eating, preening and sleeping on the wing – nested in old buildings.

But today their population is in steep decline, down 60% since the mid-90s, partly due to modern buildings.

Having made the perilous 7,000-mile (11,265km) journey from Africa to breed in the UK, they find themselves homeless.

In a bid to boost their numbers, an audacious conservation effort has begun at Westminster Abbey.

The Abbey’s College Garden has been continuously cultivated for almost 900 years.

It is in this peaceful green space, framed by the Gothic towers of the Abbey and Houses of Parliament, that work has begun.

Swift boxes have been installed on one of the administrative buildings.

“This is a Unesco World Heritage Site, most buildings have Grade I or Grade II designations,” says Anna Wyse, the environmental and sustainability manager at Westminster Abbey.

“We’ve sprayed them red to blend them a bit more with the building because of the historic environment.”

Danny Britten, head gardener at Westminster Abbey, said to ensure any juveniles swooping over London at the end of this summer were attracted to the Abbey’s boxes they used a small device that plays swift calls at dusk and dawn.

“Hopefully the young that fledged this year will hear the sound of other swifts and take that as a sign there’s a good habitat and will come and investigate,” he says.

Though it took some persuasion to install the boxes, he says, the Abbey recognised the opportunity for wildlife conservation.

They have created the habitat “even if it is a one in a million chance” that a swift will find them.

“Fingers crossed, next year or a couple of years, we might have our own roosting colony,” says Mr Britten.

Swifts are small chocolate-brown aerial acrobats that can reach speeds of up to 70mph (113km/h).

They are remarkable navigators – they can sense Earth’s magnetic field – and in a lifetime can fly two million miles.

Swifts pair for life and return to the exact nest location each year to breed.

And they have astonishingly long lifespans.

Edward Mayer, founder of Swift Conservation, says: “Blackbird, robin, lucky to last two years.

“Average lifespan for a swift, which leads a pretty tough life, seven years. And they’ve been known to get up to 21.”

While advising on the placement of the swift boxes at Westminster Abbey, Mr Mayer has been enthusing his neighbours in West Hampstead in north-west London.

New swift boxes have been added to Chomley Gardens, the 1920s block in which he lives, to increase the number of established birds.

Rod Standing, who lives in the block, says “we get to know them really well” when they occasionally swoop in and circle his living room.

They put on a show in the evening “like a cabaret”, adds Keith Moffitt.

And Poppy Kyriakopoulou says simply: “They bring summer – and they bring hope.”

Yet swifts are vanishing from our skies. Modern construction techniques have “produced buildings that are sealed,” says Mr Mayer.

“There’s a whole slew of wildlife that exploits buildings – old buildings – that can’t now use new buildings or refurbished buildings. We’re sterilising our cities and towns.”

The use of insecticides and climate change have also diminished swift numbers.

Mr Mayers says: “They’re an apex predator of insects – they’re right at the top of a biodiversity pyramid.

“And so if you have swifts screaming around in their summer flight you know things aren’t too bad. But when they start to vanish, you know you’re in trouble.”

In 2021, swifts were added to the red list of birds most in need of our help.

Conservationists have called for legislation that would force construction companies to install “swift bricks” in new buildings, something successive governments have been reticent to enact.

But in Westminster, just over the ancient wall of the Abbey – and at a block of flats in West Hampstead – people are trying to protect these incredible birds.

Swifts have a sentimental symbolism: their arrival heralds summer, and then in autumn, when London’s skies empty of their gregarious, wheeling flight, they leave a nostalgia.

So these Londoners hope to welcome them again in spring, after the long journeys they have made for millennia.