Author and activist Hannah Bourne-Taylor on Britain’s swifts

It’s August in the city of dreaming spires. Trinity term has long since ended: students have vacated their nests; visitors flown in. Down on the sun-warmed ground, the ancient streets and passageways (the most secret of which are shaded and cooled by high stone walls) throng with brightly-coloured tourists.

But we’re interested in loftier matters. (This is Oxford, after all.)

Literally loftier.

Hannah Bourne-Taylor is pedalling her bike through back lanes towards the Museum of Natural History, a structure shaped by nature itself. (Or, at least, its architecture influenced by Ruskin, who believed that art, nature and human well-being were inextricably intertwined…) (I mean, who’d have thought.)

Hannah is not here to browse the 520 species of bird, mammal, reptile, amphibian, fish and invertebrate represented within these striking, neo-Gothic walls. She’s not even here to study the 30 species amongst them, now fascinatingly extinct: the migratory passenger pigeon (the last known shot by a boy in Pike County, Ohio, in 1900); the curious, too-trusting dodo; (few even blinked, in 1662, at the birth of a new expression, ‘as dead as’).

The swift rescued by Hannah that started it all No. Hannah is here to watch another kind of leaving. A temporary one (at least for now). As she ascends a spiral stone staircase into the museum’s tower, the world darkens and stills. Climbing with her is George Candelin, whose title sounds as ancient as Oxford itself: Keeper of the Swifts. They’re making their way towards 147 swift nests: a colony studied by the Edward Grey Institute since 1948. Each year, each adult bird returns to the exact same hole it left.

Three months ago, screaming calls filled the air once more: swifts arriving back from their winter home, 3,400 miles away in Africa: brown-feathered, white-throated, black against the sky. Sleeping, eating, mating on the wing; rarely touching the ground; ready to raise chicks in towers, under roofs, inside ancient gable-ends across the country. (In Oxford, the nests they’ve built from materials caught on the wing include one celebratory version with salvaged confetti.)

Today, this year’s chicks are preparing for their first-ever migration. From bald and blind to 747s in a few bare weeks.

‘As each chick got ready to go, they spread their wings out and performed press-ups, strengthening their flight muscles. Then, in the final prep, they shuffled into position like aircraft waiting on a runway…’ writes Hannah.

A flurry of feet and feathers… ‘then a whoosh’.

Four weeks of constant flight; speeding up to 70mph.

Hannah with the finch This beloved bird, its shrill call defining an English summer as intrinsically as strawberries and cream, is on the red list: its UK populations some 62% down in 30 years, and falling. Already it has made concessions to humans, swopping traditional trees and cliffs for buildings. Now, as gaps in eaves and roofs are constantly blocked (illegal during breeding season; but who’s going to police that?); as new homes are built as sealed units, the swifts bounce off walls through which they once squeezed; flying — confused — at the space they’ve travelled thousands of miles to re-find; fruitlessly, over and over, until they break their wings, their necks.

Hannah has one goal: to try to ensure these birds thrive once more.

To try to ensure they don’t take their place, in Oxford Museum of Natural History, alongside the too-friendly dodo.

Outside 10 Downing Street credit Goda Krastinaityte We were due to meet at the Feathers in Woodstock — Hannah’s choice — to talk about (amongst other things) her book: Nature Needs You; The Fight to Save Our Swifts.

But car-troubles mean we’ve resorted to phone.

‘Tell me, you chose the Feathers ironically,’ I say.

There’s a moment’s puzzled silence before she laughs.

‘Do you know what? I didn’t even think about it! These things are happening to me all the time.’

(To be fair, her lovely, supportive husband is called Robin.)

And also — to be fair — she has been up and out since the still-sleepy hours, listening to the dawn chorus on farmland around Chipping Norton where she lives.

‘That sounds like it would be really beautiful; but it’s hectic; really hectic.’

As trustee of micro-charity Farmland Bird Aid Network, Hannah is one of the surveyors figuring out how winter-food supervisions will look next year: helping birds through the farmland winter hungry gap that haunts them like a scythed grim reaper.

And that means separating out the beauteous song into individual squawks and tweets and chaff-chaffs and machine-gunning so she can identify who the choir-members actually might be.

‘Because you’ve got all the warblers coming in: they sound like speeded-up versions of Mariah Carey. And they’re not my target area; my farmland birds are much softer… apart from the skylarks — hovering like little feathered astronauts — who try to steal the show.’

We’re talking in May: ‘So dawn is just before 5am: the sun isn’t out yet but it’s very light. Then there’s this shard of gold that lights up all the hedgerows blossoming with their hawthorn.’

It’s delightful and funny and touching listening to the calls (unlike Victorian children, these birds are usually heard and not seen); but, for Hannah, their songs can leave her broken; despairing.

Currently, 12 species of farmland bird are on the red list, decimated since surveys started in 1967: ‘A very obvious indicator that something is going very badly wrong for them. Especially when you look at their baseline populations. So, for example, tree sparrows have lost 93% of their population. Turtle doves, 99%.’

From December to April, Hannah and other volunteers will be out in their part of Oxfordshire, broadcasting seed, thinly distributing it for ground-feeders.

‘It’s minus-5 sometimes; I get really bad chilblains so my hands are horrendous.’

But that’s far from the only thing Hannah Bourne-Taylor has done for the birds she has pledged — at almost any personal cost — to champion.

Extreme action credit Ruotong Zhou In November 2022, Hannah Bourne-Taylor took off her clothes. As passers-by pulled their coats around them against the cold, she walked through crowds, naked other than a thong and ankle-boots, shielded only by her waist-long hair, and paint. Paint — beautifully applied by a stranger; Italian artist Guido Daniele — that turned her back into a mural of flying swifts; her arms into feathered house sparrows; flecks of starling colour; the dark of house martins.

Standing on an upturned apple crate adorned with the legend, The Feather Speech, she took her place at Speakers’ Corner and began, ‘I stand here as a go-between for swifts…’

Her aim? To persuade government to change the law so that swift bricks (providing cavity-nesting for eight species of urban birds, including swifts) would be made mandatory in new-builds.

And naked?

‘I really don’t think I had a choice. I knew I had to get into the national media. I couldn’t break the law or do anything disruptive (not that I would want to). But that wouldn’t help because I was trying to formally engage with the government.

‘And so, if you take that away, what’s left?’

Well, taking her kit off, is what.

Hannah on her walking campaign credit Udbhav Naik Brave and brilliant. But also startlingly sad: that something so intrinsic to us — saving these wonderful creatures — wasn’t enough. An extraordinary indictment of our media and the way people think.

And also baffling. That bricks costing between £25 and £35 each — for house-builders who make profits into the billions — can’t be built into law.

(As I often point out to people, don’t be mistaken: the media are first and foremost businesses; out to get readers, sell ads, make money.)

Hannah nods. ‘With hindsight, I should feel very fortunate that I was able to utilise the media like that. If I had been a man, I don’t think it would have been effective: I think it would have come across not vulnerable and, therefore, an uncomfortable spectacle.’

The Feather Speech credit Udbhav Naik Hannah’s speech, and her two-and-a-half mile march to Downing Street, did make the headlines, of course. And helped her gain more than 100,000 signatures on her accompanying swift-brick petition.

But it wasn’t her nakedness — as I read Nature Needs You — that shocked me. Nor was it the trolls who reacted to her ‘stunt’: disgusting comments about her body; (completely incorrect) allegations that she was financially profiting; ‘You deserve to get gang raped’.

Appalling.

(But that’s the definition of trolls; the raison d’être of the worst of our social media.)

So, again, no. It was the reaction of most MPs and ministers that poleaxed me. Ministers who are (surely?) there to listen; to act in the best interests of the public. Who should know, as John Ruskin — nearly 200 years ago — that human well-being is inextricably intertwined with nature.

Hannah is snubbed, ghosted, humiliated, side-lined and lied to… And let’s be clear: by MPs.

Arriving at the Ministry of Housing Dehenna Davison, the then-Tory minister for the Department for Levelling Up, Housing and Committees (swift bricks never seem to be under a department rooting for nature), jovially makes a speech in a key parliamentary debate on the subject, acknowledging the decline of swifts.

However, she concludes, the government should not be ‘creating financial burdens’ on developments (Meaning, presumably, £25 burdens.)

Also, she worries, floodgates would then be open to bee bricks, hedgehog holes and solar panels.

(My goodness; imagine that!)

Michael Gove — at the time, the Secretary of State with the power to mandate the bricks — encourages, then stops talking to Hannah.

It’s the sheer apathy, though, that frightens me. The near-overwhelming lack of interest.

‘Absolutely. Every single thing these people [MPs] live, breathe, think about, for the most part is simply votes.’

There are highly commended and heroes, too, of course — if in a minority.

Getting her point across credit Ruotong Zhou

Caroline Lucas, unsurprisingly.

Simon Opher, a swift champion, who signed Hannah’s petition before he even became Labour MP for Stroud.

‘He is a bit of a free-thinker, which is very unusual. He’s done a lot — the problem is that this government is very partisan so it’s very difficult to rebel against or challenge government policy. He has definitely stood up for swifts and I hope he will continue to do so.’

(Translation: Labour whipped for the swift-brick amendment in opposition; it’s whipping against it now. Ruskin would be beyond confuddled.)

And — top of the list — Zac Goldsmith.

‘I’m so glad you said that! He’s an interesting person to not know about and then read about. I reckon most people have an idea of who he is.’

He marched alongside Hannah on her naked walk; he’s been actually or metaphorically with her ever since.

‘He is uncorruptibly loyal to nature. Which is not something I’ve ever been able to fully say before.’

Speaking to the media credit Goda Krastinaityte It’s a huge subject — do read the book.

Yet it’s a very simple subject, too.

Nature Needs You changed me. The minute I put it down, I email Newland Homes, a Gloucester-based builder which gained planning permission on part of a beautiful Nailsworth valley that (in the eyes of hundreds of residents) should never be touched.

Hey ho.

The reply comes quickly from design director Tom Sheppard:

‘The swift boxes are a great idea, we have installed on other sites, so would see that as something that can easily be included here.’

I tell Hannah, who is cautiously thrilled.

‘It’s great to have it in writing; you’ll definitely have to check. Compliance is 75 percent when local authorities stipulate them to developers in planning conditions. It’s OUTRAGEOUS.’

I’m in danger of self-congratulating after one email.

Hannah must have sent as many emails as there are feathers on a swift.

Yet still her work goes on.

She pulls no punches: ‘I’m a solo, unfunded campaigner; I have been emotionally, physically and financially crippled by this campaign. So the personal cost for me is very tangible and it’s very negative.

‘And I’m still holding my breath for the swifts and it’s agony.’

Three years of relentless, vulnerable, strong campaigning.

‘But I also am surrounded by all of these strangers uniting for birds in different sectors of the public. And the strength there spells out hope. And that’s very important to cling on to.’

Such as the moment, during that naked march to Downing Street, when one of the police officers accompanying her rolled up his sleeve.

‘On his arm, he had a tattoo of a swift. He looked at me and said, ‘Thank you.’’

Stop press: the government did end up voting against the swift brick amendment. Hannah says, ‘This is not the end of the fight but it makes it increasingly difficult.’

Nature Needs You: The Fight to Save Our Swifts, is published in hardback, price £16.99; hannahbournetaylor.com