The article apparently undersells her role. Clicking through to her site, she seems to have been almost singularly responsible for making this happen:
> For my campaign – for swifts – I have walked through London naked, twice. First to launch the petition (how else would a nobody reach the almost impossible target?) and secondly to the meeting at the Home Office, with Zac Goldsmith by my side in an unprecedented show of alliance, to remind the government that swifts’ existence is at stake.
https://hannahbournetaylor.com/the-feather-speech-campaign-f...
(Probably NSFW photo on that page.)
> Julia Moulder, development director at Catalyst and chair of the G15 development committee, said: ‘If you can’t source the brick and you change it you need to go back through the planning process, and that is something that’s started happening. I think it is going to start to knock on through into delays.’
> Ian Tallentire, development director at Home Group, said he has had three or four recent instances where a brick has been changed, necessitating new planning conditions.
> ‘I have had project managers on the phone saying we need to keep going, and then you just have to make the call. If the bricks are very similar I am sometimes happy to take the risk and then go back and sort the planning permission out,’ he said.
As with most well-meaning legislation on building in Anglophone countries, these schemes are all highly-popular, cause death by a thousand cuts, and then people who like them afterwards go on to complain about how 'corporations' or 'immigrants' or 'Airbnb' or some other bogeyman is responsible for "The Housing Crisis" and so on. Before you know it, you will be lobbying your government to declare a Housing Emergency[1] and asking for them to add more requirements to building housing to ensure that sufficient housing is built; and they will gladly acquiesce to the will of the people which, while strong, can nonetheless not fight physics or economics.
0: https://www.insidehousing.co.uk/news/brick-shortage-delay-th...
1: https://www.parliament.scot/chamber-and-committees/committee...
1. Why focus on Swifts as opposed to any other species in decline? They state that they are "iconic", so maybe that's the answer? Are they more "iconic" than any other specifies in Scotland?
2. Why are these bricks the best solution? Why not take that money that would be spent on bricks and instead preserve land, or just build them dedicated houses elsewhere?
3. Why does this need to be done via government mandate versus voluntarily asking people to build Swift housing in existing buildings or land?
I'm worried that this is a government policy with great intentions that will result in economic costs with unmeasured benefits and bureaucratic bloat. Hopefully I am proven wrong!
A few token swift bricks at sometime in the future, at someone else's expense, is so much easier than preserving land, or building habitat. As an added bonus, the extra regulation makes building new houses more complicated/tedious, and older, swift-free houses more valuable and illegal to build more of, so that's a win for everyone.
Still the piece gave me a warm feeling. I also happen to think swifts are a lovely sight on the country side. Does that make them more iconic?
Prolly not.
They are a red-listed species whose population in the UK has declined by two thirds in 30 years. They are also a species for which there's an obvious measure that can be taken to reverse one of the changes which we know has happened over that time (improved building standards reducing the availability of nesting spaces).
If we can't take simple steps to protect swifts I don't think there's much chance that we'll protect anything. Conservation wise, this is really low hanging fruit.
> 2. Why are these bricks the best solution? Why not take that money that would be spent on bricks and instead preserve land, or just build them dedicated houses elsewhere?
Swifts are extremely site-loyal. You can't just hope that they will move elsewhere. Before buildings they nested in caves and tree cavities. Caves in particular don't move from year to year, so as a result the birds have a strong preference to return to the exact same location where they themselves were born and are slow to colonize other places.
Also your suggestions sound extremely expensive compared to this plan. Swift bricks cost like 30GBP retail. Yes, that's a lot more than the normal house brick they replace, but it's trivial compared to the other costs of building a house.
> 3. Why does this need to be done via government mandate versus voluntarily asking people to build Swift housing in existing buildings or land?
That's more or less the current situation in England, and perhaps unsurprisingly it's extremely rare for developers to actually install swift bricks. Indeed it's relatively uncommon for developers to actually follow through on their existing legally mandated ecological commitments [1].
Making something mandatory everywhere is also cheaper than making it only required in certain places: it eliminates all the bureaucracy around deciding whether this or that development is in the right area, and makes it extremely easy to follow and enforce the rules.
Now it is possible that the lack of nest sites isn't the dominant factor in the decline of swifts. For example it could also be related to the decline in flying insects, or changing weather patterns induced by climate change. We aren't really sure [2], however from that study: "it would be precautionary for conservation efforts to continue to focus on ensuring that safe and productive nesting sites are in sufficient supply", and we also know that the swift bricks will be used by many other bird species as well as swifts.
[1] https://wildjustice.org.uk/lost-nature-report/ [2] https://www.bto.org/our-work/science/publications/papers/dem...
But don't worry, there are plenty of other initiatives elsewhere across Scotland and the UK helping other species of birds, seeing as you're clearly interested in this subject.
- Might make life better for swifts, but most importantly:
- Further government boot stomping the populations' faces into the mud, so that they don't get uppity or forget who owns them.
Oh, fuck off.
Is it boot stomping to require people to have smoke alarms too, or are you okay with people dying in fires?
Literally right below the title:
> bricks that provide nesting for swifts and other endangered birds
And a picture.
The article does, in fact, do a perfectly fine job of explaining what a swift brick is. GP could easily have said “I couldn’t quite picture what a swift brick is”, but instead said “article did a poor job explaining swift bricks”, and that’s what they’re getting criticised for.
Reminds me of a story I read about an overpass in Texas that housed tons of bats. It creeped some folks out, so they disallowed them to roost. Once the bats were gone, the neighborhood was overrun with insects. Did not take long to have the humans get the bats back. Go bats go.
"But that's crazy", everyone said, "that'll be a breeding ground for more mosquitoes, that's where they'll all go!"
And you know what, they were right. It was hoaching with mozzies, who laid their eggs in the water, which then hatched into mosquito larvae.
Which were then promptly eaten by all the carp he'd stocked it with.
Year on year the circle of "not many mosquitoes any more" around his farm has expanded by about quarter of a mile.
One of my best memories is my grandfather cussing loudly down the chimney in the fall as he cleaned out their nests. It just echoed through the house from the stove.
Source for decline number: https://www.science.org/doi/full/10.1126/science.aaw1313
I also know the numbers are similarly dire across the animal kingdom. At least birds aren't doing as poorly as amphibians where 40% of species are threatened (https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10567568/)
I suppose because the prevailing attitude in the west nowadays is who gives a damn about preserving species.
Anyway: if there's anything I'd weep about it's that measures like these are needed in the first place. Far too little, far too late. But to be honest I stopped weeping and just do whatever I can personally such that the day I die I can at least have some peace with my life.
1. These bricks are normally installed close to the roof, under the guttering. 2. If anything, the main rodent of concern would be squirrels...but they will nest in the gutters anyway so having a sealed metal box with a very small opening is likely better anyway.
Rats and mice are ridiculously common in central Glasgow, its plagued the city for years to the point many argue its a public health crisis. While sure the suburbs might be better, I've never once seen someone describe Glasgow and rats being uncommon in the same sentence. I literally can't visit Glasgow without seeing an enormous rat in the street 5 minutes after arriving.
There are loads of nice things I will say about Glasgow - I lived there for decades. Being low on the rat count is not one of them. The local politicians constantly talk about the rat plague too.
> https://www.glasgowlive.co.uk/news/glasgow-news/rats-plague-...
> https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-scotland-glasgow-west-66732675
> https://www.glasgowlive.co.uk/news/glasgow-news/glasgow-rat-...
> https://www.dailyrecord.co.uk/news/scottish-news/probe-finds...
https://read.dukeupress.edu/environmental-humanities/article...
Go to any building site and ask a bricklayer if adding a single custom brick to the construction will stop them building the house and he'll laugh in your face.
I wonder what brings about this sort of reverse-chauvinist viewpoint? Humans are "nature" too, and we have just as much of a right to planet we live on.
> The fact is you can't leave 'existing' alone, there is none.
What does this even mean?
If they were smart they would make it a tax break, and the more you do to welcome animals on your property the bigger it is. Why just one swift brick? What about a bird house? How about a little shelter for cats? Animal lovers get rewarded and those who would rather not don’t get punished.
If you're so opposed though, you could always vote them out in the next Scottish election.
It's kind of like how a developer might be totally fine with an inefficient line of code and accuse you of prematurely optimising. But then the entire program is slow, because this mentality leaks to every line of code in the codebase. So they hate "slow software" but they see no problem with the individual inefficiencies.
Sounds like HN: Make the public pay, while the private keeps the profit.
Hmm, probably not a very good argument for you to make unless you are a libertarian, in which case you wouldn’t be complaining about tax breaks anyhow.