Modern buildings not accommodating to swirling swifts

ANOTHER LIFE: MY BACHELOR pad in Dublin, in times long past, was carved out of a roof space in the heart of Ballsbridge, overlooking what was then the capital's newest and glossiest hotel. But the view beyond my parapet was mostly of the city's sky and so, in summer, of its most spectacular wildlife, the swifts. The sky, of course, was always a fresh-washed blue and the swifts drew endless arcs and loops upon it, dawn to dusk.

Ecstatic swirlers, sons of air

And daring, daughters of the slow burn,

Who twist and kiss and veer, high

As kites on homecoming . . .

Thus Eamon Grennan’s tribute. But the birds who seek their brief connubiality on land have fewer and fewer homes to come to, as builders forget their debt to Apus apus, the ultimate avian blessing on their work.

The swift is “the quintessential city bird”, as a chapter in the new Bird Habitats in Ireland (Collins Press, €34.99) puts it. The book’s scientists review its problems in cities of modern, sharp-edged cubes.

Swifts like to nest high, and the tall buildings of Georgian Dublin had eaves at their roofs and bare soffit boards. Today’s blocks of offices and apartments have no such accommodating details.

In modernising Galway, the repair of old buildings has led to a heavy decline in swifts over the past 10 years.

In Northern Ireland, too, as swifts lose the nesting spaces their generations may have used for 100 years, many in old linen mills, the summer population is falling by 2 per cent a year.

On my open Atlantic coast, swifts are missing from the sky. (The woodshed swallows, while almost equally aeronautic, are of a different tribe, the hirundines). Mayo’s distant county town, however, has held on to a loyal little legion of the birds, and next year, with any luck, their numbers will be quite a lot higher.

In Castlebar, an increasingly green and leafy community, the county’s campus of Galway and Mayo Institute of Technology incorporates the old psychiatric hospital.

Half a dozen swifts still return to its Victorian eaves, their long fidelity marked by bright patches of lichen on the walls

below. Their arrival this year – May 6th – was duly noted by Lynda Huxley, chairwoman of the college’s award-winning “green campus” committee.

Watching the swifts over the years and aware of their island-wide decline, she was drawn to the voluntary conservation work of the Northern Ireland Swift Group ( saveourswifts.org.uk). This was founded by three enthusiasts who had each, independently, established swift nesting colonies on their houses.

Now, through lectures and videos, they promote the use of “swift bricks” – hollow bricks made of woodcrete – by architects, engineers and homeowners and mounted, for example, in the new extension of Belfast’s Crescent Arts Centre.

Advised by the group’s Brian Calahane, and with county-council funding under Agenda 21, the Castlebar campus now has bricks for a dozen nests mounted neatly at a modern roofline across the courtyard from the old hospital building. Inside each are a few bright feathers plucked from Lynda Huxley’s hens, and a looped CD of swift calls has been playing every day.

Thus attracted and intrigued, about a score of swifts have been swooping around the courtyard to sneak closer looks at the properties on view. Next spring will tell how many birds have actually moved in; two matchbox-size cameras, with luck well placed, will offer the kind of intimacies offered on the website mentioned earlier.

This has not, of course, been a good year for the swifts, so totally dependent on aerial insects to feed themselves and their young. As the habitats book details, fledging takes up to 56 days in cold, wet summers, compared with 35 days in dry, warm ones.

A bird observatory near Hull, on England's east coast, reported swifts flying south in thousands in the opening days of July, a full month earlier than the usual start of migration (see swift-conservation.org/news).

In Dublin, in a “normal” summer, swifts make a feast of the clouds of ants that rise above the city in nuptial flight when conditions of warmth and humidity are right (often some time around this weekend).

But the capital will never again know the numbers that swooped along the streets in the 19th century, hawking after the myriad flies around horses and their dung.

“We have, on many occasions,” wrote the Dublin naturalist John Watters in 1851, “observed crowds of car-boys and others, striking at them on the wing with whips, or other missiles, in the neighbourhood of the quays . . .

“[We] saw eight of those unfortunate birds ‘living in death’ with their wings broken, offered to the curious for the merest trifle.”

Eye on nature

While stargazing in my back garden early this month, I saw a flock of birds fly overhead in V-formation about 250ft above ground, along the line of the Royal Canal. They had pale undersides illuminated beautifully by our local pollution. I assume they were geese, but are they likely to be here in midsummer?

Peter Denman, Maynooth, Co Kildare

Brent geese can arrive here from the Arctic as early as the end of July, but earlier in the month is very unusual.

I saw a creature very like a hummingbird in my garden, its wings beating extremely fast as it flew rapidly from flower to flower. Instead of a beak it had a very thin proboscis. I have never seen anything like it in Ireland.

John McCarthy, Corbally, Limerick

It was a hummingbird hawkmoth, a summer visitor from the Continent.

Early in July I saw a hummingbird hawkmoth, feeding on honeysuckle, at Rathsallagh House near Dunlavin.

Katherine Dunn, Booterstown, Co Dublin

On July 15th I came across a pond full of almost fully grown tadpoles in the Wicklow Mountains near Lacken.

Declan O’Loughlin, Celbridge, Co Kildare

Due to the cold they are unlikely to develop into frogs this late in the year.

Michael Viney welcomes observations at Thallabawn, Carrowniskey PO, Westport, Co Mayo, or email viney@anu.ie. Please include a postal address