Nature Needs You The Fight to Save Our Swifts

About this book

The inspirational story of a bird lover who became a nature-warrior in a David sv Goliath battle to save swifts from extinction.

Nature Needs You tells the compelling story of how Hannah, without campaigning experience, funding or contacts, set out to save swifts from extinction in the UK. Her mission is to change the law and make 'swift bricks' mandatory so that the birds who nest in our walls will have a future in Britain. Nature Needs You delves into the highs and lows of trying to win hearts and minds, grab the news agenda with her naked Feather Speech, win Caroline Lucas and Lord Zac Goldsmith's support, navigate meetings with Secretaries of State and debates in the Houses of Parliament, survive the trolling and midnight self-doubt and raise a petition with the requisite 100,000 signatures for a Parliamentary debate. At stake, with a decline in numbers of over 60% since 1995, are the birds who have become our symbol of summer, the swifts screaming in the skies above us.

Steeped in love for the wild, by a talented writer, Nature Needs You is a clarion call to save the nature on our doorsteps and prove that passion can be a superpower in bringing change to nature-depleted Britain. Raw, funny, self-deprecating and unstoppable in turn, this is nature writing with the pace of a thriller. Hannah is now knocking at the door of the new Labour Secretary of State for Housing, in the hope that, where Rishi Sunak and Michael Gove failed, Angela Rayner and Matthew Pennycook will save our swifts.

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Biography

Hannah Bourne-Taylor is a conservationist, bird-lover and author of the acclaimed nature memoir Fledgling (2022). An award-winning eco-campaigner, named on the Ends Report green policymaking 2024 Power List, Hannah's mission to save swifts has been backed by the RSBP, conservationists from Chris Packham to George Monbiot, politicians including Zak Goldsmith and Caroline Lucas and local swift groups nationwide. Hannah lives in Oxfordshire with her husband and their two Ghanaian rescue dogs