Sadly more building works affecting nesting swifts

[Andrew Turney]

Would you believe that I received a message late on Wednesday evening to say that the National Trust for Scotland had erected scaffolding at Broughton House in Kirkcudbright, which is one of Dumfries and Galloways better towns for swifts - Broughton House has become famous for its swifts and the colony extends along the local streets. The records on SwiftMapper show records for nests on the building in 2025 and that the NTS staff were aware of the swifts, the local record centre has records of swifts at the building going back into the early 2000’s.
My colleague, Barry O’Dowd who is based in the town went round this morning to speak with staff and more scaffolding was being erected when he arrived, close to where swifts were entering nests. We then both spent over 4 hours trying to penetrate the NTS systems to speak with a manager who could stop the work and sadly failed.
At this point I decided that I needed to get things happening fast so I used a contact within the National Wildlife Crime unit and asked for support - within 1/2 an hour an officer based at Castle Douglas had spoken with the scaffolder’s and stopped the work and spoke with the NTS staff. He contacted me with an update and will be calling round in person to check the site.
It demonstrated the importance of having the right contacts who will take action quickly + the bigger issue of managers in organisations not understanding their responsibilities … we discovered that the painting was due to be done earlier in the year but got delayed, so they just carried on despite all that was known about swifts nesting at that site.
Unfortunately this incident will rumble on as the nests on a 2nd elevation of Broughton House have been compromised by more scaffolding so some active nests are likely to have been lost.
I will provide an update when we have more concrete information.
Bw
Andrew