The Swifts of Rowsley have been under intense scrutiny for the past 3 years yet some of the information collected as part of this project happened by chance, rather than by design, and that in itself has led us to revise how we look at Swift conservation over the county as a whole. Who’d have predicted that by focussing our efforts on one village we’d find at least 2 hitherto unknown colonies in the local area?
The previous blog listed the volunteers who had generously given up evenings in the summer to monitor Swift colonies, counting and recording, often for hours at a time. Some of these volunteers live some distance from the Rowsley site but, as we all know, once infected by the brain worm that is the scream of Swifts, it is impossible to switch off and the awareness that Swifts are around never disappears.
And so it proved, as our volunteers starting identifying Swift activity in their own areas. The first site to be identified is located just 4 miles south of Rowsley on the A6 heading into Matlock, in an area of ex-social housing called the Hooley Estate. This has now been surveyed over two seasons and the distribution of nest sites is shown below in a screenshot from the Derbyshire Swift Survey map which includes records up to 2022. Over 20 nest sites have been identified but this seriously underestimates the number of nests as many of the rear aspects of the properties on the estate are inaccessible so monitoring is necessarily incomplete. It is likely to host at least 40 Swift nest sites, hence has some significance in the context of known colonies in Derbyshire.
The second colony lies between Rowsley and Hooley and was only identified in 2023 by one of our volunteers using SwiftMapper, followed by a visit to assess the Swift status. This area of housing, situated behind the Fish Bar in Darley Dale, consists of long terraces with deep eaves which overhang the fronts of all the properties and discussions with local residents suggest that it too will prove to be a colony of significance.
That the area between Rowsley and Matlock is so rich in terms of Swift colonies (and there may yet be more to find) is undoubtedly helped by the close proximity of the River Derwent combined with large numbers of properties which still retain the vital nest sites Swifts require to breed. We will continue to look for new sites along the Derwent but we will also focus on how to best protect and enhance these new colonies.
Rowsley aside, there are a number of well-studied Swift colonies in Derbyshire, identified and monitored by organised and highly competent groups, and we hope to highlight these in future blogs. There are also a number of towns and villages we know have breeding Swifts but these have yet to be properly monitored and assessed. However, there are many more places which remain unknown in terms of their Swift breeding status and with that comes the risk that we may be losing Swift colonies we don’t even know about. How many more “Rowsleys” are there in Derbyshire? What do we need to do, and how do we find the resources necessary, to identify them? After all, if we don’t know where they are, how can we protect them?
In future blogs we will review the use of video as a tool in Swift surveying and, secondly, look at a completely different aspect of Swift conservation: the planning system in Derbyshire and how new housing developments represent such a great opportunity to create new nest sites for our Swifts.
Acknowledgements: thanks to Sue Bliss, Jenny Downing, Sheila & Ken Evans, Chrissy Grocott, Lucy Robson, Nigel Smith and Andy Broadhurst for survey work and Nick Brown and Claire Mead for their comments on the original text.