Monday 27 April 2009

There was quite a strong wind today and no swifts were seen, neither did I go cycling today. So I will tell a little bit about how I came to watch swifts.
As recent as 2006 I started with watching swifts. Before that time I have once seen a swift crawl into a nesting hole.
It started with me taking one lecture about swifts, martins and swallows, because I could not keep them apart. On our local yahoo mailing list for birds I have read many times of one guy inventorising their nest holes and after the lecture I wanted to cycle past his house, it was even on my way back home. When I approached his house I saw a swift fly into a wall and disappeared. I met LP and he showed me the young chicks in his observation box and gave me a book to read, “Swifts in a Tower”.
It started me off and in 2007 the Environmental dept of the city supplied nestboxes for free and even hung them.
You can see the entire process if you click here.
In 2007 I played the sounds of Erich Kaiser once in the morning and once in the evening, all 79 minutes of it. On the 19th July 2007 at 13:10 I saw the first swift crawl into one of my nest boxes.
In 2008 I had a pair in the nest boxes. They were such a pair! Both came flying in and only one can go in, the other will fly a circle and come back and fly in another nestbox. Some nights they did stay in the same nest, some nights only one came in, but every night I stood on the street and watched I saw at least one came in. Will there be a nest this year?
There are many swifts in this area. Most houses were built between the two World Wars. My own street was planned in 1901 and my house was planned in 1923 and built before WW II. Old houses, old eaves and lots of cracks and openings for swifts. Once I climbed up the university library tower and when I looked down I could see why it was so easy for me to attract swifts. From our biggest colony to the neareast water supply it is a green “belt”. The Pope’s College is almost connected to Park Abbey with trees all the way. I live somewhere in that “belt”. From the street you cannot see how many trees there are in the gardens behind the houses.

Apus College is right of the trees of the city park.

The white building is Phillips with the Abbey just behind it.

Last year I spent long days on the bike searching for nesting holes. Soon I learned how to look for the swoop before they fly into a nest hole. Many hours I stood in drafty streets to wait for one to fly into a nesthole so I could be sure.
I found a lot of them.

The best natural nesting hole I ever found.