Poor year for Swifts

One thing I have noticed this summer is that it been a poor year for seeing swifts high above the village feeding. In past years you would see number of pairs of birds low over the village eating the insects on the wing. This year I have just counted the one pair in all, which such a shame for they are lovely to watch in the warm evening of the summer.

The swift is an amazing bird spending most of their life in the air and can fly to attitudes in excess of 18,000 feet when migrating. They feed, drink, mate and sleep on the wing, and in fact they only land to breed. They are just beautiful to watch as they soar high in the sky on a summers day. They spend their winters in Africa and flew through Spain and France every year to get to our shores to breed and leave our shores once the insects they feed on become harder to find. While in Africa they follow the winter rains to and the insects population which swells in numbers in the rain and the heat.

Now there are a number of reasons sight for the lack of birds this year the major one of them being the weather the cold wet summer meant when they arrived in this country there wasn't enough food for them to eat. Many left in search of food and those that stay were seen pushing unhatched eggs from the nests as they couldn't feed themselves let alone the chicks if the eggs if they hatched. Hopefully those that left and those that stayed found enough food to fly home to Africa for the winter.

The other is that we are destroying the places where they nest. Each summer when they return to Britain they are finding harder find spaces in the lofts of old buildings which are being renovated and more and more of their habitat is being developed into housing without any thought to what it is doing to the wildlife of this country, something I have talked about before on this blog.  

They say when the swifts leave the summer is over. If that is the case it never began. Even the pair I have seen I fear have left to return to warmer climbs given the weather we have now. There are even predictions of frost for some areas of the country this week, if you believe the papers, but I know one thing for sure it feels more like autumn than summer, which is not the way to end the summer holidays for the children.