They’ll be ruthless about displacing house sparrows who try to steal their space, so we hope the questing sparrows we saw at the gutter a few weeks before didn’t get as far as nest-building. In Spotlight: Swifts and Swallows, Mike Unwin reveals their fascinating lifestyles, explains how and why they have acquired their similarities, and suggests ways in which we can help protect them. With the help of her sisters and cousin, Shenanigan grudgingly takes on the case, but more murders, a hidden treasure and an awful lot of suspects make thing seriously complicated.

Common swifts are now red-listed and at risk of local extinction in Britain, owing to modern house-building techniques that deprive them of nesting sites, and indiscriminate use of pesticides. In fact, he estimates that his yield per square metre is triple what it was when he participated in that damaging system, for the same amount of work. For centuries, common thinking was that they hibernate rather than migrate (which would make them the only birds ever to have done so). The book beautifully captures the themes of leaving home in pursuit of safety, friendship, and adventure. His lifestyle is also a deliberate resistance to hyper-speed modernity: he scythes his grass, spends days preserving a haul of walnuts, and tries his hand at pressing oil and making spirits.There is so much support for this bird across the UK with over 90 local swift groups running but the bird’s decline continues unabated. We don’t have much to go on with swifts, but on some occasions Gibson glossed over the details of the studies we do have, which for someone desperate to know how swifts sleep and how they stop flies sticking to their eyeballs was quite annoying.

she manages to cover both her own relationships with swifts as well as describes meeting others helping recover the swift population. The current push to help swifts is requiring that nest blocks or boxes be incorporated in every new home design. The author has worked for the Shropshire Wildlife Trusts for a good many years, and the jacket tells us that she has harangued her colleagues for using incomprehensible jargon and shoddy grammar.I have a TBR a mile long and young readers aren’t my priority anymore, so it takes a lot to push one to the top of the list. Swift Awareness Week 2021 (3-11 July) has over 60 local events around the UK starting this Saturday so please do support any that are near you.

Claire Powell is a bestselling children's book illustrator who got her first book deal in 2016 and has never looked back. All distributable profits from the RSPB's wholly owned subsidiary RSPB Sales Limited (registered office: The Lodge, Sandy, Bedfordshire SG19 2DL, registered in England under company registration no. Rescuing insects from a swimming pool in Fledgling by Hannah Bourne-Taylor and In the Quaker Hotel by Helen Tookey. The few-page run-on sentence about how humanity has gotten itself into the climate crisis is pretty great (though Lev Parikian did so much more concisely in Into the Tangled Bank: It’s “f***ing f***ed”). This is particularly the case when old buildings are renovated, or new blocks of flats are being built without provision for swifts to nest and rear their young.

I was already delighted by everything about The Swifts, but this loving inclusion just put it over the edge. For more details, please consult the latest information provided by Royal Mail's International Incident Bulletin.