This one is for the birds..The BBC is reporting a woman walked through the streets of London on the weekend, nearly naked and painted as a bird in protest of the decline of the swift population..The common swift, called simply “swift” in Great Britain, is a soft-tailed, black bird that nests in buildings and hollow trees..On Saturday, Hannah Bourne-Taylor, 36, from Oxfordshire, showed up in Hyde Park wearing blue, black and white body paint applied by artist Guido Daniele, to present a petition supported by the Royal Society for Protection of Birds (RSPB) and Rewriting Extinction..Speaking, conveniently, at Speaker's Corner in the park, Bourne-Taylor spoke as if she herself was a swift.."We are screaming for you to help us, to look up to remember you share your home with other kinds," she said.."Through these shared struggles we only ask for one thing, a safe place to rest after our perilous journey home.". Hannah Bourne-TaylorHannah Bourne-Taylor .Her petition, called The Feather Speech, calls for "swift bricks" in all new housing developments, meaning buildings would require bricks with holes that would become nesting environments for four declining UK species: swifts, house sparrows, house martins and starlings..From Hyde Park, Bourne-Taylor marched with protesters to Downing Street where she read out a letter to Prime Minister Rishi Sunak..In her letter, she said: "Please acknowledge our walls also belong to adventurers.”."Behind the theatre of this campaign, there is a serious issue of development [causing] biodiversity loss.”."These cavity-nesting feathered neighbours are not included biodiversity net gain measures despite all of them facing national distinction because of us.".According to Emma Marsh, executive director for RSPB, more than half of many bird species in the UK have disappeared from the skies in just 20 years, partly because of a lack of suitable nesting sites..She urged people to sign the petition "to help ensure swifts and other species that have traditionally nested in the cavities of our buildings have a safe home to return to every year"..It’s not Bourne-Taylor's first intervention on behalf of swift..Four years ago, she nursed an abandoned bird back to health by letting it nest in her hair, spending 84 days looking after the finch while she was living in Ghana in 2018..She allowed it to live on her body and in her hair, feeding it until it was strong enough to return to its wild flock.
