Belfry cabinets without screws

We have recently looked at a belfry in Suffolk where there is no way of attaching nestboxes directly to the church fabric. Normally one can either screw the boxes to wooden louvre frames, or by screws into joints between masonry blocks. Screws into the masonry would require a faculty.

The church in question has flint and lime mortar walls, so it would not be sensible to attempt screws into the walls, even if permission was granted. The louvres do not have a frame adequate for supporting nest boxes. 

So, if this project goes ahead we plan to use a system that was first used in Holy Trinity, Haddenham over 10 years ago. Holy Trinity is on a hill and has slate louvre blades 350mm apart.

The church architect has kindly provided a PDF of this installation, which was approved by the DAC.

Download the PDF to see detail

We thought it worth publishing this now, as there will be many belfries suitable for swift boxes with this particular challenge.

The key idea is that the sides of the openings (the reveals) are lined with 25mm WBP plywood which is braced with 20mm diameter galvanised threaded steel rods fitted with locking nuts and pressure plates. Then the boxes are screwed to the plywood.

Any tapering or unevenness of the reveals can be filled with suitable softwood wedges.

The picture left shows the particular belfry we are considering and some outline computer models of what we might do:

Click on image to enlarge

St Vigor's Belfry

The roof on St Vigor's church, Fulbourn, containing 4 Swift nest sites under the eaves (described here), needed repairing. Although the nest sites could be preserved, it could not be done without the Swifts losing the 2016 breeding season. It was therefore decided to install nest boxes in the belfry for the displaced birds.
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Before the 2015 season, we installed 8 boxes on the west side of the belfry. Attraction calls were played throughout the summer, and birds were seen investigating the boxes but no pairs became established.

However, in 2016,  2 pairs of Swifts raised chicks and a third box contained a small amount of nest material and an unhatched egg.

Following this success, a further 10 boxes have now been installed in the south side.

In both cases, only the top two louvres are accessible from the inside, the lower louvres being obstructed by a wall.

In most belfries,  a simple box cabinet with a vertical front wall is used. In the case of St Vigor's it seemed better to angle the front at 45° over the louvres.

David Gant, church warden lead the project, ensuring that the attraction calls were played consistently in both years

The following pictures show how it was done.

The south side - view from the inside

Computer model showing how cabinet fronts relate to louvres

2 cabinets before installation. The upper cabinet abutted against the vertical wall,
and the lower cabinet fitted below the top louvre

10 boxes installed. Photo David Gant

The entrance positions are dictated by the stonework resulting in larger central boxes

Santon Downham Church

St Mary the Virgin, Santon Downham, in Suffolk is in a very attractive setting on the edge of the village green

It also has the easiest belfry that we have seen for installing Swift boxes. There is even a solid floor to stand on while working on the boxes!

In the lower half of the picture, left, it can be seen that the louvres are flush with the sides. This makes it very straightforward to screw the boxes to the sides.

Bill Landells has done an excellent job installing 18 boxes in 6 cabinets on 2 sides of the belfry, 3 on each side. All with access doors for inspection.

There is the potential for 2 odd-shaped boxes above the top cabinet. As Swifts always seem to go for the tops of the louvres first, this may be something worth pursuing in the future.

St Mary the Virgin, Santon Downham

Sedbergh Community Swift project at St Andrew’s Church

When Dick went up the church tower with Edmund at St Andrew’s, Sedbergh, his comment was that ‘this is the most difficult tower I’ve come across yet. Pity it’s your first!’ The church is a good location to try, however, as swifts nest not far away in the eaves of Sedbergh School library. 

by Tanya & Edmund Hoare

St Andrews, Sedburgh 

And undeterred we went ahead, even though the design of box required was rather complex, and needed entrance tubes for the swifts.  The tower is not boarded on all sides. 

Luckily we had fantastic help from Nick, the local vet. Without his super carpentry skills this project could not have been accomplished.

Over the winter he and Edmund have spent many cold hours up the tower working out what to do. But finally the boxes have been installed behind the louvres of the west side, and an attraction call system has been fixed too.

The boxes could be fitted with cameras later.

All we need now is swifts!

The entrance tube is there to get through 2 layers of netting to the outside world

Nick installing the boxes, left, and the completed job, right.

An idea that has not worked (yet)

In 2010, we installed 3 Swift boxes in St John's Church, Bury St Edmunds. While we all like publicising our successes, it is probably informative to publish the odd failure as well. Despite playing attraction calls every year, with Swifts showing interest and banging the nest box entrances, by 2015, we still have no boxes occupied.
[UPDATE JULY 2016: I suppose it was tempting fate giving this post its title, as the re-engineering described below has resulted in 2 pairs of Swifts raising 2 chicks each]
[UPDATE JULY 2017: the boxes were increased to 12 this year, all of which show some evidence of Swift activity: 4 had chicks, 2 had eggs and 1 well feathered when last inspected] 

The west side of St John's, the boxes are
near the bottom of the right side

The church has a very high tower, but the windows are not louvred, they have a trellis pattern with a  large number of diamond-shaped holes, with netting on the inside. The entrance to each nest box is an equilateral triangular tunnel, with sides 65mm. This should be enough for a Swift to enter, but clearly they don't like the look of it.

Despite our attempts to make the entrances stand out (literally), it could be that the profusion of holes confuses the birds.

We have decided to re-engineer the entrances, by removing the floor of the triangle, so that the birds have a whole diamond available.

We have also added a small ramp below the entrances to the boxes (see last picture below).

If we could get Swifts into these boxes, the potential of this church is enormous. The pictures below show what we have done.

3 entrances, before re-engineering. The 'ladders' below the entrances were added later.

Close-up of 1 entrance

The 3 boxes rest on the floor

A re-engineered entrance with the entrance
floor removed and a ramp below the box.

xxx

The re-engineered entrances reinstalled

Swifts and traditional nest sites in Anglican churches

This is an appeal for records of Swifts nesting in churches in Oxfordshire, Berkshire and Buckinghamshire

by Chris Mason

St Nicholas, Islip, one of the many Oxfordshire churches
which formerly had nesting Swifts

50 years ago most of our local parish churches had nesting Swifts.

Now in my part of the country (North Oxfordshire) I reckon it’s roughly one church in seven, and even those will eventually disappear as essential repairs and maintenance work are carried out; or rather they would have disappeared. But this is now much less likely as a result of an agreement reached with representatives of the Oxford Diocese (Berks, Bucks and Oxon).

Holy Trinity, Shenington,
where Swifts still nest under the eaves

The agreement is that if planned repairs will affect traditional nest sites, the sites will be left intact if possible, and if that can’t be done efforts will be made to create alternatives.

Also in appropriate cases the Diocese will look

favourably at proposals to include Swifts bricks when major renovations are being undertaken, and at the idea of nest boxes behind louvred windows.

Major renovations are already planned for the church in Cropredy (below left) where Swifts still nest in a wall of the tower and we expect the church will benefit from the new agreement. Swifts have also nested for many years at the church in Kidlington (below right). We hope the same will apply when the roof there is eventually repaired.

St Mary the Virgin, Copredy (left) and St Mary's, Kidlington (right)

However all this is dependent on one thing – knowing which churches in these counties are being used by Swifts.  At present I only have information about parts of Oxfordshire.

So this is a plea to anyone visiting or watching in any of these counties to note and report any Swift activity around Anglican churches; also if anyone already knows of a church in these counties which has recently had nesting Swifts please would they report as below:

Any reports for Berkshire please inform Jan Stannard

Any reports for Oxfordshire please inform me: Chris Mason

Any reports for Bucks please inform me for the time being. At present there is no one in the Swifts Local Network based in Bucks. I am working on that.

Parties of Swifts wheeling and screaming around village church towers and steeples are one of the glorious sights and sounds of an English summer. I hope we can keep it that way.

Swifts on BBC One Songs of Praise

On July 17th 2015, a BBC film crew visited the Worlington Swift Festival at All Saints Church, for a piece to be included in the religious program 'Songs of Praise' on 27th September. 


You can read the history of the Worlington project up to 2012 on this blogpost and about the last Worlington Swift Festival in 2013 here. In 2013, there were 11 pairs in the belfry, then 20 in 2014 and now 26 in 2015.

More Swift boxes in St Neots church

In 2007, we installed 12 Swift boxes in the north side of the belfry of St Mary the Virgin, St Neots. Most years, attraction calls have been played and in 2014, 9 of the 12 boxes were occupied. With the help of generous funding from 'St Neots in Bloom' we have now added 32 more boxes, 16 in the east and 16 in the west.

[Update July 2015: 2 pairs occupied the new boxes on both the east and west sides and the occupied boxes in the north increased from 9 to 10 pairs]

by Dick

West side of belfry, the boxes are just
visible half way up the louvres

The louvres in this church are enormous, and it was not possible to follow our usual advice of putting boxes behind the highest louvres first. We therefore went for putting boxes behind the openings half way up. Even so, it was quite a feat of engineering to erect boxes 15 feet above the floor of the belfry. We thought that entrances here would be more obvious to the Swifts compared to entrances behind the louvres.

We had 2 choices for the colour of the boxes, black or stone. We chose stone (Sandtex 'Mid Stone') to provide a better contrast for the entrances. Whether this contributed to the success of the first 12 boxes we cannot say, but it worked.

Battens were affixed to the stonework each side of the louvres, by screwing into the soft mortar. No holes were drilled in the stonework. The boxes are secured to these battens.

8 of the 16 entrances on the west side.

The original 2 cabinets contained 6 boxes each. This was done at a time when we thought that Swifts required a larger space. Since we have discovered that Swifts readily accept smaller boxes, we increased the number of boxes to 8 per cabinet, we could not have got any more entrances in the limited size of the openings in the stonework. The floor area of each nest box is 20cm x 29cm.

4 completed cabinets, ready for installation

The inspection doors of the earlier cabinets were a simple flap rotating about a single screw. This wouldn't have worked in the new cabinets because the flaps would have collided, so we went for a simple hinge and a catch.

Many people contributed to this phase of the project, not least, Alison Pearson of St Neots in Bloom with their generous funding and encouragement, but also Jake Allsop, Bill Murrells, Bruce Martin, Bob Tonks, Judith Wakelam, Alan Clarke, grandchildren Katie, Lucy and Benjamin Thompson (who got paint all over his shirt). Lastly, we would like to thank the Vicar, the Reverand Dr Paul Andrews, and PCC for their permission to do this project as well as Catherina Griffiths, David Griffiths and George Bonham for their help with access to the church.

We hope that residents and visitors to St Neots will enjoy a magnificent Swift spectacle for years to come.

The original cabinets on the north side installed in 2007

New cabinets on the west side installed in 2015.
The cabinets on the east side are similar

Experiences with small Swift boxes

Since 2006, in my local church belfry in Landbeach, we have had 4 cabinets, each containing 4 large boxes, and the swifts have ignored them, though 3 swarms of bees have not. As soon as we added small boxes in 2013, behind the top louvres, we had success.

[UPDATE JULY 2017: We think we have 6 occupied boxes this year, 3 raised chicks]

by Dick

All Saints, Landbeach

We have been getting a gratifyingly high success rate with small Swift boxes. e.g. not only 4 out of 8 small boxes in Landbeach church, but also 7 out of 12 air brick liners occupied in St Neots, and 6 out of 18 small boxes in Worlington church. These boxes have a floor area of 175mm-200mm x 200mm and at least 100mm internal headroom. 

In the two churches we played attraction calls using the Cheng Sheng player-amplifier. In St Neots, no calls were played, but the boxes were installed as mitigation for lost nest sites. 

In all three cases, the entrances are set back from the 'outside world': behind louvres in the churches and behind a thick barge board in St Neots. All occupations were achieved within a year or 2 of installation. 

Further evidence of the acceptability of small boxes is at St Mary's Ely: the success rate of the smallest boxes with floor area 100mm x 300mm marginally exceeds the larger boxes. Also the successful Losser box in Holland has a floor area of only 160mm x 165mm. The Ibstock swift brick, with an internal width of 100mm is accepted by Swifts.

So, it is established that boxes with a small floor area are accepted by Swifts. Could they even be preferred? We are now trying to establish where the limits are with headroom, before occupancy rates drop off to an unacceptable level. There are many examples of Swifts nesting successfully with low headroom under tiles, and we know of one occupied box in Cambridge with internal headroom 75mm, floor area ~120mm x 375mm. These birds raised 2 chicks.

We are now in the process of reengineering the Landbeach church cabinets. The louvres are close together (80-90mm), so, originally, to give what we thought was adequate headroom, the entrances were behind every other louvre gap. The original four cabinets had 4 boxes each with floor area 200mm x ~400mm and internal height ~180mm.

Two of these cabinets will have each box further divided into 4 smaller boxes - each one half the height and half the floor area. There will be 2 entrances within each louvre gap (see cabinet on the right below). In the other two cabinets, each original box is divided into 2 with half the floor area, but staggered in such a way that there is at least 1 entrance in each louvre gap. So, to make this work, there are some boxes at the top and bottom of these 2 cabinets with smaller headroom (see cabinet on the left below)

Part of the incentive for doing this is to make the boxes less attractive to bees, a problem peculiar to this belfry. Bees should not survive a winter in a box this small. But the main incentive is in the nature of an experiment (somebody has to try it), which ultimately may mean modifying one of these 2 configurations to the other in the future, depending on the results.

If small boxes are at least as effective as large boxes, then they should be preferred - they are less obtrusive and easier to install.

Front arrangement of entrances

Hinged inspection doors

(Dead) Swift on concave in box with headroom ~130mm

Swift in box with low headroom of ~85mm