I spend more time looking through the kitchen window. Of course, the robins are still in the garden, they are just keeping themselves to themselves, as robins do when they’re not fighting or protecting territory. I’m so relieved. I watch them dart about, the male bathes in his favourite water-butt bird bath while the female perches on her favourite rowan branch (they have a branch each, which is a delight). Then they swap – him drying off in the rowan, her taking a bath. An evening shower after a long day of, what? Sitting on eggs? Feeding young? Laying eggs to replace those that have been eaten by squirrels? They fly off, in the direction of my neighbour Kate’s garden, and I know this is my time. I dash out, excitedly, nervously, and fumble to use my phone to locate the nest. I don’t know where it is exactly, but know it’s somewhere in the hops. It doesn’t take long to locate it. Through the viewfinder I home in on a little grassy bowl holding six eggs. Six eggs! I take a photo and dash back to the house to look at it. The photo is blurred and so I have to return, stealthily, to get another, which I make sure is in focus. I run back into the house again and shut the door. Phew!
Six eggs! They are beautiful, perfect. Cream-speckled brown with a matt finish, laid in two neat rows of three. Some are lighter while others are more brown. I write everything down for the BTO, including the time of day, the height, aspect and overall description of the nest. The six eggs. Six eggs!
The nest is marvellous, built on a ledge of hop stems just beneath the trellis. It’s entirely hidden by hops but also right against the wall, so is protected from wind. They have been enormously clever. I look back at my notes and realise I first noticed them looking for a nest site in early March; this event has been two months in the making. I am so in awe of them.
I return to the kitchen and watch to make sure they return to the nest. They do, or at least the female does – I don’t know what the male does while she sits on her six eggs. I see him on his little rowan perch, bathing in his makeshift bird bath. He is part of this garden and I love him, I love them both. This place has nothing of the magic of the New Forest but it has the potential to have six more robins than it had a few weeks ago. I’m absolutely determined that it will.
We had, perhaps, not factored in the possibility that Mum had forgotten how to grow tomatoes. She used to grow them every year but stopped when she had her haemorrhage and hasn’t tried since. It has been at least five years. I try to direct her from Brighton.
‘Show me photos,’ I say on the family group chat. She keeps forgetting, tells me she’s tired from (still!) weeding the path and watering. I’m worried she’s overdoing it, that she’s taken on this task and is giving it too much, that the weedy path is distracting her from the tomatoes. Eventually, after much nagging, she sends me images of plants in too-small pots, supported by enormous bamboo canes that are very loosely tied to not very much at all. Ah. I suggest she repots them into slightly larger containers, pushes the canes into the compost rather than leaves them loose, and sends me more regular updates.
As well as the tomatoes and sweet peppers, she is also growing basil. She was going to grow it from seed before I suggested she buy a pot of basil from the supermarket and then divide up the rootball, potting each young plant up separately. Supermarket basil is actually lots of plants crammed into one pot together; they have few roots for the amount of leaf and don’t live long (they’re not supposed to). But if you remove them from the pot, separate the individual plants and pot them into containers of fresh compost they will develop more roots and grow into strong plants. It’s a much easier way of growing basil than from sowing seed. However, these too are looking straggly and sick, and are also being supported by bamboo canes. I suggest she cuts them back and waters them a bit less often. ‘OK!’ she says.
All but one of the pumpkin plants has been eaten by snails.
‘Have you thought about removing slugs and snails from the greenhouse, Mum?’
‘Great idea!’ she says. I tell her I’m worried Stanley won’t have any pumpkins for Halloween.
‘Right,’ she says. ‘Well, I’m very tired.’ I can tell it’s all a bit too much for her and feel bad for nagging about the pumpkins. But really, Mum, have you considered not weeding the path?
She does her back in and needs to rest. We all agree this is a good idea. Ellie takes over watering duty and, once again, the basil plants are drowned. I decide to take a break from nagging about the pumpkins; it’s the last thing anyone wants and it won’t be the end of the world if Stanley doesn’t get his Jack-o’-lantern. There are bigger things to worry about.
It’s dry again. Amazing how quickly things can change from too wet to too dry. It hasn’t rained for weeks, the ground is starting to crack again and my four water butts are empty.
Again.
The garden is OK, for now. I’m more prepared this year; I’ve been watering and keeping the pond topped up (hence the empty water butts) and I’ve already moved the mop bucket into the shower to collect grey water to reuse on the garden. But it’s nesting season and the birds are struggling – in the park, I watched an exhausted blackbird follow volunteer gardeners as they weeded the rose beds. He left with a full beak of worms but what will he do now the gardeners have gone home? How are he and his chicks now?
The robins are flying back and forth with bits of this and that – the eggs must have hatched. I look through my binoculars at beaks of tiny worms and other morsels. I’m pleased to see there’s some food around for them, but there’s not much. The flowers are still devoid of bees, there are few flies, I’m still not seeing anything like the abundance of even 2022 – where are they all? Where are the red mason bees, who started nesting in my bee hotels and then abandoned ship? Where are the butterflies? By this time in 2022, I had found three batches of small tortoiseshell caterpillars. Where are the mining bees, the plasterer bees? I planted angelica for the wasps but the flowers have gone over and I didn’t see a single wasp or even one insect on the blooms. What’s going on? I see similar reports on Twitter, whole patches of wildflowers empty and quiet, people in despair. Where are the insects? Was it last summer’s drought or the fluctuating winter temperatures? Was it the cold, wet spring? Are the insects dead or just late? All of the above, probably. I watch a robin take a sunflower heart from the feeder and ‘rinse’ it in the bird bath for moisture before taking it back to the nest. Oof, that’s not good.
Nestling birds don’t drink. They get all of the moisture they need from caterpillars, worms and other grubs. Or so they should. Twitter is full of people crying over starving chicks in their nest boxes, of a new ‘Silent Spring’. Rinsing sunflower hearts to feed to baby chicks surely means my robins are struggling, too. What if the chicks are dehydrated? What if they’re not getting enough moisture?
I wait for my moment to steal a photo of the nest and take it when both parents fly out of the garden. I find three fluffy things with gaping beaks. Baby robins! I run back to the house and look at my photos closely. I think there might be more among them. There were six eggs, could there be six chicks? I make a plan. They are finding some natural food at the moment but it can’t be easy and they’re obviously substituting it with sunflower hearts. Plus, the starlings and house sparrows have fledged and the garden is full of hungry chicks, putting even more pressure on precious resources. How can I help? I can water the garden, of course, encourage worms to come to the surface. What else? The robin chicks are tiny, so small morsels are better than anything big; it seems too early to introduce mealworms. But I have a compost bin of soft, moist brandling worms, of course! When it gets hot they climb to the top to escape the heat and I find piles of them when I lift the lid. Would they like a tablespoon of brandling worms? I open the lid and they are gathered obligingly in little piles on the ridge. I’m so sorry, brandling worms. I fetch a spoon and load them on, and then drop them at the end of the garden, near the robins’ favourite bird bath. I return to the kitchen with binoculars and wait.
It’s a long wait; the robins are suspicious of me and I worry that the worms will just work their way away and not be found. But sure enough, eventually, one of them stops at the meaty pile and takes a worm and eats it, like a human might test food before giving it to a child or sprinkling milk on to the back of their hand to make sure it’s the right temperature. Once satisfied the worms are not poison, it then picks up a couple and takes them back to the nest. Yes!
It’s dry and there are few insects but the robins have a garden with some availability of natural food and a couple of tablespoons of brandling worms each day. There’s a hanging feeder of sunflower hearts that I usually take down at this time of year but which I know is helping to fuel them as they search for better food (I’d like them to stop feeding sunflower hearts to their chicks, though). There are full, fresh bird baths for them to bathe in. I will take photos of the nest only every few days so as to not disturb the parents or the chicks, and the dog and I will shoo cats and crows out of the garden. I can’t do much better than that for now, but I hope I can make a difference. I’m not going to give up on these robins.
The swift spends its life in the big blue sky, airborne except when breeding. It flies here each spring from the rainforests of Africa, lays eggs, raises young, and then leaves again. As the chicks get ready to fledge, they prepare themselves for a whole lifetime of living above us, by doing ‘press-ups’ in the nest.
The swift has declined by 50 per cent in the last 20 years. I dare say there were even more of them 20 years before that, and I try not to think how few of them there will be in 20 years’ time. They used to nest in tall trees but we chopped them all down, and now they nest in buildings, although we’re making that hard for them too. They eat insects, which some studies suggest have declined in abundance by 75 per cent, and they have to navigate fires and storms on the way back to the Congo in summer (and yes, there’s less and less of the Congo rainforest each time they return). Now, in parts of Europe, their nests get so hot the chicks jump out of them prematurely, to their deaths, although lucky ones are saved and raised in rescue centres only to starve or be caught in a storm a few months later. Every single year the number of swifts arriving in Brighton seems smaller and every year another piece of me dies. Could I witness their extinction in my lifetime?
We can help them, to a point. They need nest sites, positioned on the north side of buildings so their chicks don’t fry. They need food to feed themselves and their young, so they need insects, which means they need meadows and ponds and trees and gardens, an absence of pesticides, paving and plastic. They need good weather, which is to say they need a stable climate. They need a stable climate.
It takes a lot for me to get in touch with strangers and ask them if they would consider putting up swift boxes. It seems like an imposition, like an inconvenience – surely the last thing they would want to do while having work done to their house. But, sometimes, I overcome this fear and ask anyway, although I haven’t done so since writing the letter last autumn to those with the scaffolding and the new roof, who ignored me completely. I still take their rejection personally but I must remember that this isn’t about me, it’s about swifts. And they don’t have a voice.
So it is that, when a man posts about his scaffolding on a public group on Facebook, I comment to see if he would consider putting boxes up. He lives on the next road and has a wonderful pitched roof, where I have actually seen swifts ‘banging’ or searching for new nesting opportunities. If he put boxes up, there would be a good chance that the ‘bangers’ would return and find them and thus would help expand the colony of ‘bin lorry’ swifts from the other side of the main road. It might even encourage them to nest with me.
He writes back with a resounding yes, and invites me round. Oh!
I head over on a sunny but windy Saturday afternoon, to find him halfway up his scaffolding, muttering over a downpipe. His name is Peter and he’s nearly 70 but he’s doing all the work to the house himself, which includes fixing the guttering and downpipes, re-rendering bits that need rendering, something about stress fractures and finally a new coat of paint.
‘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.
