Hannah Bourne-Taylor: Saving swifts, naked protests and the bird that nested in my hair

‘I thought, okay, well it worked for Lady Godiva, didn’t it? This whole naked stuff? So let me give that a try. I felt like it was the only option.’

Just as it worked for Lady Godiva, so it has for Hannah Bourne-Taylor, the campaigner, naturalist and writer who has spent years fighting for change to help Britain’s bird population — and particularly the swift.

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After spending years overseas in places where she was surrounded by birds and nature, Hannah was dismayed on her return to see how little is being done to help preserve wildlife — and particularly with regard to her favourite bird, the swift. And after deciding to do something about it, she launched the campaign which has now taken years of her life — and which, as she tells James Fisher on the Country Life Podcast, has seen her enjoy a blaze of publicity by marching up and down Whitehall without a stitch on, in a desperate, yet wildly successful, publicity stunt.

She tells James about the swift, their plight, and how the simple introduction of one or two ‘swift bricks’ added to each new build house could have an enormous impact at negligible cost, by providing safe nesting for birds whose former favourite spots have increasingly disappeared due to modern construction techniques.

Hannah also talks about her love of nature in general and the struggles she’s faced, from battling apathy and indifference to hastily adjusting a stick-on G-string in the House of Lords toilets. She also tells a tale from an earlier time in her life, when a tiny lost fledgling nested in her hair as it recuperated before rejoining its family.

It’s a fascinating glimpse in to the mind of a woman who is in equal measure strong, brave, eccentric and passionate. Once you’ve listened, we’d highly recommend Hannah’s books for more: her latest, Nature Needs You, about her battle to save the swift, and Fledgling, her story that rewrites ‘the conventional boundaries of the relationships people have with animals’.

Episode credits

Host: James Fisher

Guest: Hannah Bourne-Taylor

Editor and producer: Toby Keel

Music: JuliusH via Pixabay

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