There's been a few Swifts over the last three days ..but today they came in thick and fast. And every year we think about putting up a Swift box ... but never have. For many years we had a pair of Swifts nesting above next door's back bedroom window, but when some work was done up there the aperture had disappeared ..a familiar problem. (On several occasions I would have to pick a Swift up off the lawn... they can't take flight from the ground ... you have to launch them from the upstairs window ...but be careful .. they are generally covered in fleas and lice.) Anyhow, I knew I had, somewhere in the murky depths of the "office", a booklet all about making nest-boxes .... and amazingly I found it .... it's rather ancient... 1963. And inside there was indeed instructions for a Swift box ... here they are ... Well, that's all fair enough, but my problem is, how the hell do I fix it on our stone-walled house ? I have tried to drill into it for other purposes, and it has always defied my attempts to make any impression on it. And it would be 20x trickier if I was 20 ft up as well. I'm lucky ... had the house been 30 ft high, it would probably have been 30x trickier. Here's some handy advice about keeping pests away .... using "the bouncer" .... ... and here's how to attract the all-important Swifts to your box .... .... ... but nowadays you can get gadgets that emit Swift Screams for a radius of 8 miles around your house. So ... all is pending. How do we ..or rather, I .. attach the things ? I suppose I will have to google it. Grrrr. Or get " a man" in. There's some smashing adverts in the booklet too .. here's an example ... But after all that merriment, the music .... Here's a question for you .... when I've been typing this recently, when I post it onto the blog it comes out in huge letters .... I've tried making the font smaller and smaller but it still comes out massive once I publish it.
What I want to know is, is that what you see as well ... great big print ? Will someone kindly let me know ..and even better, someone out there might know what's going on and how I can fix it. email me at [email protected] or in a Comment. [later ...strangely, 20 minutes, it isn't doing it now ... but it probably will do it again shortly. ] sure enough ... next morning ... it's reverted back to the GIANT stuff. Bah. Grrrr. Note: it's not the upstairs windows that are covered in fleas and lice ... it's the Swifts.
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AuthorThat's the author up there ... I was young and sprightly then. Archives
October 2022
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