Our swift nesting capacity is increasing...
as we've just added a couple of bricks.
It wasn't completely straightforward.
Last summer we installed a wooden swift box, high up, on the north facing apex wall of our house.
As far as we know, we were not successful in attracting any swifts, despite the inclusion of a 'swift caller'. We did see swift flying above our house, but I suspect they were far too high in the sky to hear the swift calls from our box. July was also quite late to install & attract swifts.
Swifts are also very social birds, therefore just having a single box did not feel right.
So we thought we'd take the opportunity during the winter months to add a couple more.
As this is a long term project, we took a look at the Action for Swifts website. They make a great range of swift bricks for both new build homes and existing properties.
Having establish that our walls are 'stretcher bond' construction, using bricks that were approx 215 x 100 x 65mm high, and having measured the cavity gap as about 80mm, we contacted AfS and ordered 2 x double length brick swift boxes, as per their recommendation.
Our walls are painted white over what we think are Midhurst White bricks. AfS often try to match brick types, but in our case they just supplied some kind of red brick finish. I was happy with this as I was going to paint them white anyway.
I was less happy that my builder spent quite a while grinding out part of the existing bricks above/below the opening after removing 2 bricks, to create enough space for the new boxes. I mentioned this to AfS who then said we should have had the smaller, 75mm high swift bricks for our application. Thanks!
Anyway, we are happy they are in, and we now have capacity for 3 pair of nesting swifts.
If we get some interest from juvenile swifts next season (from May to August) we will almost certainly get 3 more!
No comments:
Post a Comment