Swift Nestbox Project

This week is Swift Awareness Week (3- 11 July 2021) and we wanted to share the Swift Nest box Project with you.

Rob McCune from Grounds and Neil Hildreth from Maintenance have been working on the Swift Nestbox Project to help the Swifts which we have here on Campus during the summer. Both Rob and Neil have a keen interest in the birds  and are passionate about helping them out. All the boxes have been designed and built by Neil, who is a joiner here at YSJ, and both Neil and Rob have installed them at various locations on LMW. Of the 28 boxes installed , 7 have been hidden in the roofspace of the Quad building with a further 6 visible on the walls of the Phoenix building. Then next to that there is a bank of 15 wrapped around a curved tower thus creating our very own Swift Tower! (See attached map and photos)

YSJ Nature Campus Map
YSJ Nature Campus Map

The Swift is a medium sized highly aerial bird which spends most of its life on the wing, arriving here in the UK around April/May to breed before returning to Africa in August. A lot of nest spaces have been lost over the years and the Swift is now classified as Amber on the conservation status. Hopefully our nest boxes will be taken up by younger Swifts in the next couple of years looking for somewhere to breed to help increase numbers of this unique bird. In the meantime the Grounds team will be keeping an eye on them to see if any have been prospected by ‘screaming parties’ of younger swifts, keen to raise their young on our Campus. (attached are pictures of the swift tower and other boxes on Phoenix and in the quad, also a swiftlet that was rescued here at LMW).

One thought on “Swift Nestbox Project

  1. Fantastic project, wishing you every success. We put boxes up in 2016, and by 2018 had our first breeding pair. We now have 4 pairs. I’m in South Kirkby, West Yorkshire.

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