As part of our Buzz and Flutter campaign to boost nationwide biodiversity, Meadfleet has partnered with Action for Swifts. This collaboration helps protect swifts, one of the UK’s most rapidly declining bird species, by supporting their conservation work and raising awareness of the challenges swifts face. By working together, we’re helping to safeguard this remarkable bird and ensure they remain a familiar sight in our skies each summer.
Why Swifts Need Our Help
Swifts are a migratory marvel that spend almost their entire lives in the air – they eat, sleep, and even mate while flying. Each summer, they return to the UK from Africa to nest in the exact same spot year on year. Between 1995 and 2022, swift populations severely declined by 66%, due to several factors including urban development, insect decline and climate change. Swifts will often nest in safe, dark, out of reach spaces such as small crevices and gaps in older buildings. As these buildings are increasingly demolished to make way for modern developments, many of these traditional nesting spots are being lost. New buildings often lack suitable features for swifts to nest in.
Swifts are highly loyal to their nesting sites, but when these sites are lost or sealed off, the birds are unaware after their long migration. Having flown thousands of miles and with limited energy left, they often spend valuable time circling or attempting to enter blocked nests. As a result, many pairs fail to breed and some swifts will injure themselves trying to reach blocked nests.
Who Are Action for Swifts?
Action for Swifts is a UK based volunteer-led conservation group dedicated to reversing the decline of swifts and other cavity-nesting birds. With swift populations having fallen sharply in recent decades, the organisation works to raise awareness, influence building practices, and provide practical solutions to support these birds. They design and supply swift bricks and nest boxes that can be easily integrated into new and existing buildings, offering safe and permanent nesting spaces. They also provide expert guidance to developers, councils and various organisations on how to install these nesting features effectively and at scale.
Homes for Nature
Homes for Nature is an initiative led by the Future Homes Hub that encourages wildlife-friendly features in new housing developments. It calls for the installation of a bird-nesting brick or box with every new home built and proposes that hedgehog highways (small openings in fences to allow hedgehogs to roam freely) become a standard requirement in all new developments, starting through planning processes from 1st September 2024.
So far, 28 homebuilders have signed up to this voluntary commitment. This collective effort aims to deliver at least 300,000 nesting bricks and boxes, supporting swifts and other declining bird populations across the UK with the help of Action for Swifts.
Our Commitment
While we don’t build homes, Meadfleet plays a vital role in managing the green spaces around them, ensuring these areas provide food, shelter, and safe corridors for wildlife.
Through our Buzz and Flutter campaign targets, we’re committed to planting 150 native oak trees, establishing 1 kilometre of native hedgerow, planting 100,000 flowering bulbs, and sowing one square metre of wildflowers for every home across the developments we manage. These efforts will create essential habitats and abundant food sources, especially insects, that benefit swifts and other wildlife to support healthy, biodiverse ecosystems.
About Meadfleet
Meadfleet are a leading sustainable land-adopting management company. We have in-house ecologists with expertise in the BNG metric and are already applying the principles of Biodiversity Net Gain across our existing open space portfolio in England and Wales. Established in 1995, Meadfleet manage over 330 developments and 42,000 residential properties in our portfolio, with a strong balance sheet.
Meadfleet offers management of Biodiversity Net Gain delivery both on a managed development and on offsite areas, either via customer contributions or commuted sums. Our adoption model relieves developers of ongoing liabilities and management costs.
The Meadfleet model removes onerous liabilities from homeowners yet still encourages their input and engagement into the management of their local environment. We are committed to providing an excellent service to residents as demonstrated by our Excellent rating on Trustpilot and are members of The Property Ombudsman Scheme (TPOS), offering customers free, independent redress should they feel it is required. We are happy to work with residents groups and positively encourage the creation of these on the developments we are involved with. We believe this opens an effective two-way dialogue between homeowners and ourselves.
As a land-adopting management company, Meadfleet take long-term responsibility of open space, building customer and community relations and implementing perpetual management and improvement plans. We take a holistic and independent approach to managing areas of open space for the benefit of all residents, biodiversity and the wider environment.