I received the following email today:


Every year, the nestlings/fledgelings of house-nesting birds die
agonising deaths.

Apart from cats getting the young, the nestlings/fledgelings walk
along gutterings. When they encounter the swan-necks of gutterings,
they try to hop across the swan-neck's orifice, but, sadly, most young
birds do not get across, they falling in to the swan-neck pipes. Then
they plummet right down the virtical downpipe. The downpipes end piece
is below ground, where a gulley is there to drain away the house
roof's rainwater. Unless rescued from this entombed disaster, the
young will die, of cold, fear, etc, maybe even drowning should their
be a torrential downpour sending torrents of cold water down the
downpipes.

My brother lived in a council house. He and I heard distress cheaping
coming from a cast-iron downpipe of his house. I put my ear to the
ground-level end of the pipe, whereby I could easily determine a young
bird or young birds were entombed below ground. We smashed the pipe at
ground-level, shone a torch down the hole, noticed two wet,
bedraggled, frightened young fledgelings there. Then we made a lasso,
tied it to a thin garden cane, lowered the noose in to the hole, then
intricately lassoed each one in turn, then returned them to their
parents' nest. My brother then put a wire mesh cone in the orifice of
all his guttering swan-necks, as did I for our swan-necks But, the
wire cone must not have any jagged bits sticking up from the
swan-necks. The top of the cone should prefariably stand about 4 or so
inches proud of the swan-necks' orifices, then the young will not be
able to even traverse further along the guttering away from their nest
areas.

Plastic mesh cones would be best. Apart from the cones saving birds'
lives, the cones stop roof moss, leaves, etc, from blocking up the
swan-necks' orifices. This bird hazard also applys to any
non-residential buildings that have gutterings and downpipes. Birds
even plummet down between wall cavities, the void between a house's
outside wall and its inner wall, unless wall cavity insulation has
been installed in the cavities. Wall cavity insulation is then a
bird's saviour, otherwise the bird/s can plummet down the cavities to
below ground level, about 12 inches to maybe 18 inches from the top of
your ground floor hallway level. If that happens, and by a miracle you
hear their desperate cries, and cleverly detect they are in the void
of the wall, the only way to rescue them is to smash a 3 or 4 ft
length of your bottom course of hallway brickwork away, about 3 brick
layers high, so you can put a mirror in and shine a torch on to the
mirror to keep focusing around to see them. I did this to my hallway,
and rescued 4 young starlings.

Best wishes.



Francis H. Giles

Please relay this info to as many bird-caring folk as possible by
whatever means of communication. Many thanks!
Angus Macmillan
www.roots-of-blood.org.uk
www.killhunting.org
www.con-servation.org.uk

All truth passes through three stages:
First, it is ridiculed;
Second, it is violently opposed; and
Third, it is accepted as self-evident.
-- Arthur Schopenhauer (1788-1860)