‘This is the only time I’ll have scaffolding up so you timed your request well,’ he says. He invites me to climb his scaffolding and I reluctantly agree, taking deep breaths while trying not to look down.
‘You get used to the height!’ he says, as he warns me not to bang my head on scaffolding boards while I climb a wooden ladder. Funny, at the top of his four-storey house, with 30mph winds whipping around us, this is of no comfort to me at all.
I tell him about swifts and show him precisely where I saw them banging, taking pleasure in being able to touch the wall they have scouted. I tell him that they seem to love a pitched roof, that I’ve seen them banging all along this strip of houses and that I’m sure there is one nest nearby but that the majority of them live on the other side of the main road. He tells me he has a mate who builds swift boxes and that he intends to fit a few, both at the front and the back. I am delighted.
I don’t ask but wonder if his immediate enthusiasm for erecting swift boxes had anything to do with The Feather Speech, Hannah-Bourne-Taylor’s campaign. Conceived on the hottest day the UK has seen to date, Hannah’s idea stole the nation’s heart. The aim was simple: to get 100,000 signatures on a petition to ask that swift bricks be made compulsory in new-build homes, which would mean the issue would be discussed in Parliament. How would she achieve this? She would take her clothes off, of course – how else do you get attention for a serious issue?
The Feather Speech took place on Hyde Park Corner one autumn afternoon in 2022. Hannah wore nothing but a thong, boots, and body paint naturally depicting swifts and the three other endangered cavity-nesting birds that the campaign sought to help (house martins, starlings and house sparrows). With support from the RSPB and Rewriting Extinction, she gave an impassioned speech to launch her campaign. I watched on social media, agog, wondering if she would get her 100,000 signatures. No one had done anything like this before.
Over the next few months, Hannah appeared on television and radio and in newspapers and magazines. Piers Morgan and Channel Four News interviewed her. She attended an event at the National History Museum wearing a gold taffeta dress decorated with paper cut-outs of swifts. She encouraged people to sign her petition in the street, on the tube, on social media. She didn’t give up. She didn’t once stop. She never focused on rejection or used it as an excuse not to stand up for swifts. As her campaign grew, I realised that she was a force, a power among the nature community and that she would not let this go or ever let the swifts down. In the end, she got more than 100,000 signatures; of course, she did. She also made sure the issue would be debated in Parliament (apparently it’s not guaranteed) and secured the support of several MPs and Lords. All of that got even more media attention, and I lost count of how many national news items I watched where people were discussing homes for swifts. The outcome of the debate was an unhappy one; despite impassioned pleas, Parliament denied the requests. But suddenly, everyone was talking about swifts, and people were putting up nest boxes where they had scaffolding. Suddenly, I had renewed confidence in asking a stranger if he would put swift boxes up, and suddenly, he said yes. Suddenly, a little corner of our world looked a little wilder.
I want to tell the swifts about The Feather Speech. I want them to know that the tides are turning, that years of habitat theft are finally yielding a new kindness, new ways of learning to live among other species. Not just for them but for everyone. ‘Can you hold on?’ I mouth to the sky. ‘Can you keep going for another few years? We have plans for you, little swifts, and we are doing everything we can to save you. Don’t give up on us yet. Don’t ever give up on us.’
In the pet shop I buy sunflower hearts and mealworms. I take them home and fill a new, clean feeder with sunflower hearts, and add a few mealworms to the robins’ favourite bird bath on top of the furthest water butt, in the hedge. The chicks are bigger now – there are five of them, with grumpy downward smiles, semi-open eyes and pin feathers. It’s time: if they can thrive on rehydrated mealworms they may yet fledge successfully.
I don’t know how old they are. I read up on different stages of robin development to see if I can anticipate when they will fledge, at which point I will need to keep 24-hour guard for cats and crows. I learn that they start opening their eyes on day 5 and have fully opened their eyes by day 8, and that they fledge on day 13. I checked the nest for the first time last Saturday, when I found six eggs, then there were fluffy things three days later, on Tuesday. Today is Monday, so if they hatched on Sunday they are eight days old, but if they hatched on Tuesday they are six days old. And did they all hatch on the same day? I’ll never know. Today’s photo shows three with open eyes and two with shut eyes – it’s clear three are stronger than the others. The female robin lays one egg a day and starts incubating them only after the last egg has been laid so they hatch at around the same time, but the first eggs still have some developmental advantage over the later ones, and it looks like the sixth egg didn’t hatch at all. The three with their eyes open must therefore be from eggs one, two and three, and the two with their eyes shut will be from eggs four and five. Phew! Open eyes means day eight – they hatched on Sunday. Perhaps the weaker two hatched a day later.
You can buy live mealworms, but rehydrating dried ones in water is fine and far less gruesome. Other birds love them too but, so far, don’t seem to have noticed where I’ve put them. They are bad for hedgehogs so I’m deliberately leaving them up high and out of the way – there’s more wildlife than the robins to think about.
As with the brandling worms, I stand in the kitchen with binoculars and wait for the robins to find their quarry. This time the wait is much shorter – a robin pops to the bird bath, takes one, eats it and then takes another and flies back with it. My plan is working! I’m reading too many reports of chicks starving in their nests this dry, cold spring, but I refuse to let that happen here. I’m still leaving out brandling worms but now they have mealworms, too, which I will drop into fresh water each evening so they have moist things to feed their chicks in the morning. These birds will not starve on my watch, I will make sure of it.
The parents fly out of the garden for other morsels and I take my chance again for another pic. I grab it and go, retreating back inside to coo over the details. I can’t believe how much they’ve grown, the little darlings. Such grumpy-looking things but with real feathers. They grow up so fast.
The doorbell rings. Through the frosted glass I see a woman carrying a box. I open the door, ‘Hello!’
‘Hello, I know you like frogs.’
I laugh. ‘Erm, yes? Have you brought me a present?’
‘I found him under the tarpaulin in our front garden,’ she explains, ‘can you take him?’
The frog is a female, already gravid with next year’s spawn.
‘She’s a she,’ I explain, ‘you can see her belly where the spawn is developing.’
‘Oh,’ the woman says. ‘Do you think she wanted to spawn in my tarpaulin?’
‘No,’ I reply, ‘it’s late, they would have done that in February.’
‘February? Gosh.’ She looks distantly in the direction of her tarpaulin, as if imagining a pool of tadpoles she had somehow missed.
She tells me where she lives and points to her house and her husband. The husband and I wave to each other. I want to ask if hers is the front garden that has tarpaulin laid over the whole space, which has been there for at least a year, and if she has plans for making it nice (this seems a bit rude so I don’t). I also want to ask her if she or any of her neighbours has or had a pond in the back garden, where my toads might have come from. But I don’t manage to get the words out.
Neither do I ask why she was so determined that the frog should live at mine when it was clearly happy beneath the tarpaulin. Many frogs are found beneath such materials, where they remain cool and moist, and where they might find food such as small slugs and worms to eat. As much as I hate plastic pollution and the locking away of land that could be used to grow plants and provide habitats, a wet-skinned frog could do worse than shelter beneath tarpaulin during a dry spring. But no matter. I take the frog through into the garden and pop it gently among the herb Robert in the shade; if it liked the tarpaulin so much it will be back there tomorrow. Before she leaves, the woman laughs and says again, ‘I know you like frogs.’
‘I do,’ I reply, ‘I like them very much.’
The tadpoles in the pond are coming along nicely, although there’s so much duckweed I don’t often get a good look at them. If I sit beside the pond I can see little divots in the surface where they pop their heads up to eat something, or if a sparrow has a bath and has left a ‘window’ in the weed I can see them swimming beneath. I keep meaning to remove the weed but it’s such a delicate operation when tadpoles are present, as you have to check each clump you remove, for swimmers. Larger tadpoles may be able to wriggle their way back into the water if the weed is left on the side, but smaller tads won’t. So I leave it until it gets to such a point that I just can’t anymore. Besides, it hasn’t rained, so the duck weed will be reducing the amount of pond evaporating into the sky, and it also makes hunting more difficult for crows. Both of these things I am grateful for.
The pond is nearly full but only because I’ve been topping it up. I am now using tap water, which I decant into a water butt for a day, removing the lid so the chlorine and other nasties can evaporate, before releasing it into the pond. I don’t like using so much tap water but I don’t like the garden drying out either, and after the heartbreak of 2022, I am mindful not to let it dry out completely. Plus we had a wet winter so there is more in the taps to go around. The backswimmers still haven’t returned, neither the adults nor their tiny nymphs, which normally appear at some point in May and grow from tiny, wingless boats into large, silvery synchronised swimmers. When pond dipping I’ve always found masses of them. They are so huge and majestic and I miss them so much. I wonder where they went last summer when the pond dried out; the wingless nymphs will have been eaten by birds and hedgehogs but the winged adults will have tried to find more watery habitats. Canals? Rivers? A garden pond that someone was topping up?
There are no dragonflies or damselflies, either. No papery exuvia left on plant stems, which is the sign that a nymph has climbed up before finally metamorphosing into an adult. I’m hoping they will recolonise the pond but I have seen few so far this year. It’s early, though, there’s still time. What else did I lose? I don’t even know. Mayflies, perhaps, although numbers have decreased since they first colonised the pond four years ago. Those little brown beetles, the non-biting midges, the mosquitoes. Surely there are mosquitoes? Perhaps the duckweed is putting them off, or the tap water isn’t as free from nasties as I thought it was and is too much for the more sensitive aquatic larvae.
It’s hard to know what to do for the best; just yesterday I had a rare visit from a frazzled-looking blackbird, exhausted from another season of trying to raise young without rain. He stopped for a drink and a bathe, a bit of shade, before disappearing again. The pond needs topping up for the birds and hedgehogs, the tadpoles, the missing species that I hope will return. When it’s full the garden feels alive. It feels cooler, more relaxed, green. Perhaps my four water butts aren’t enough, perhaps I need to bite the bullet and erect an ugly rainwater tank in the side return. Perhaps it will rain soon.
I check the forecast: nope, not for another two weeks at least.
Maybe it’s the duck weed, then. Backswimmers locate water at night, they’re known for landing on silvery car roofs by accident, which they mistake for water. The duckweed has turned the pond green, which means they won’t be able to see the water, so it must be stopping them from being able to recolonise it. Of course. I take a cushion from the bench and drop it at the side of the pond to kneel on, and use my hands to finally scoop the weed out. I check each pile carefully for tadpoles and drop any I find back in the water. The weed I leave in little piles on the edge so leeches and water hoglice can make their way back. I spend half an hour on the job, which is about as much as I can bear.
Common pipistrelle, Pipistrellus pipistrellus
The common pipistrelle is the smallest and most common of our 18 bat species. It’s the one that flies above my garden and is most likely to fly above yours. All British bats are nocturnal but most emerge around half an hour after sunset. In summer I drink wine outside and wait for my one pipistrelle bat to fly in a big loop that takes in my garden and the houses behind it, over and over again.
Pipistrelle bats are so small they can fit into a matchbox, and so they eat midges, tiny moths and other small flying insects, which they find in the dark using echolocation (a series of shouts, which then echo or bounce back from prey so they can home in on them). One pipistrelle bat can eat 3,000 midges in one night. There are three types of pipistrelle bat: common and soprano, which were discovered as separate species only in the 1990s, and Nathusius’s pipistrelle, which is slightly bigger.
They roost in tree holes, bat boxes and the roof spaces of houses, often in small colonies. In summer, females get together and form maternity colonies, in which they give birth to one pup each. They feed their pups milk for three weeks until they are able to take them out on foraging trips, where they teach them to become independent. They hibernate together, too, in north-facing boxes that aren’t warmed by the sun, and in gaps with no draughts. This ensures they remain, hopefully, undisturbed.
To garden for pipistrelle bats is to garden for insects. Let grass grow long, grow plenty of native plants, shrubs and trees, which are more well used by insects than those from further away. Grow flowers for nectar-feeding moths. A pond works well for bats, too – at dusk midges appear from nowhere and dance above the water, before my pipistrelle arrives and gobbles them all up. You could put up a bat box or let an old tree remain old, where holes and crevices will provide opportunities.
In the UK, bats are one of the few species to be fully protected by law; it’s illegal to disturb a bat roost. If they live in your roof consider yourself lucky, they are some of the few species that have learned to live among us.
June
Little nephew Bert has arrived. I take the train to Birmingham to meet him and he sleeps for most of the day. He is tiny and precious, he fits in the crease of my elbow and I have to keep reminding myself he’s there. He has milk spots and puffy eyes, the most perfect little hands, which he clasps together like an old man. He looks like Ellie, pale with a shock of bright yellow hair. When she leaves the room I style it into a Mohican.
Mum pops round to water the tomatoes, which are finally growing strongly. She takes basil leaves for her lunch, marvels at the beginnings of peppers.
‘Are you feeding them?’ I ask.
‘Yes, I am feeding them and watering them and staking them and all the things you told me to do,’ she says. I think she’s enjoying the process, hard work though it has been for her. I think I will give her plants again next year.
The squash plants all died and the big bin of compost remains in the garden, unplanted. Stanley will not get his pumpkins; it was too soon for him and everyone else has a lot going on. I’ll try again in a few years. I’m there for just 24 hours but I manage to feed Bert, tickle Stanley, catch up with Ellie and Gareth. The morning before I leave I actually sit down and do the crossword with Mum and Pete. We are shockingly bad at it. I get the first clue wrong (I suggest ‘cache’ rather than ‘stash’), but Mum can’t spell, follow instructions or, it seems, read a complete sentence.
‘Darling, I’ve had a brain haemorrhage!’
‘This is abundantly clear.’
We laugh, a lot. We are lucky. We are very lucky.
The robins should fledge today. I don’t know what to expect – do they fledge in the morning? One by one or all together? The chicks are so big now I can see them poking out of the nest from the lawn.
