{"id":3506,"date":"2018-06-25T20:43:52","date_gmt":"2018-06-25T20:43:52","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/wakefieldnaturalists.org\/?p=3506"},"modified":"2018-06-25T20:43:52","modified_gmt":"2018-06-25T20:43:52","slug":"giving-swifts-a-little-help","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/wakefieldnaturalists.org\/?p=3506","title":{"rendered":"Giving Swifts a Little Help"},"content":{"rendered":"

It was Swift Awareness Week last week. Work was a bit busy then but, a week later, I have finally put up two swift nestboxes that I was prevented from putting in place earlier in the year.<\/p>\n

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Swift nestbox.<\/p><\/div>\n

By doing a little research, I found that swifts are more likely to use a box if the interior is dark, so I painted the insides of my two new boxes black.<\/p>\n

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The effect of painting the interior.<\/p><\/div>\n

It did not seem right to expect swifts to lay eggs on a perfectly flat surface, so I created a nest concave for each box. The simplest way that I could think of to do this was to cut a set of circles of decreasing size in pieces of card and glue these together. I also thought the birds might prefer a box that looks a little lived-in, so I glued a few feathers, from our budgerigars, into the concave.<\/p>\n

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Nest concave.<\/p><\/div>\n

The main way to increase the probability that the boxes will be used is to play the calls of swifts to attract them to the boxes. To do this, I bought a couple of small speakers, or tweeters, and a small, cheap amplifier unit. the tweeters are attached to the boxes and the amplifier is in the house. This set-up plays swift calls from an SD card and is turned on and off using a timer plug.<\/p>\n

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Tweeters.<\/p><\/div>\n

Finally, I placed the boxes below the eaves of the house.<\/p>\n

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Swift boxes (left) and house sparrow boxes (right).<\/p><\/div>\n

I have missed this year’s breeding season but I hope that some swifts will have a look at the boxes before they return to Africa for the winter.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

It was Swift Awareness Week last week. Work was a bit busy then but, a week later, I have finally put up two swift nestboxes that I was prevented from putting in place earlier in the year. By doing a … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[32],"tags":[411,405,410,27],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/wakefieldnaturalists.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3506"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/wakefieldnaturalists.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/wakefieldnaturalists.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wakefieldnaturalists.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wakefieldnaturalists.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=3506"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/wakefieldnaturalists.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3506\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3512,"href":"https:\/\/wakefieldnaturalists.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3506\/revisions\/3512"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/wakefieldnaturalists.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=3506"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wakefieldnaturalists.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=3506"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wakefieldnaturalists.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=3506"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}