As parliamentary species champion for the swift I recently contributed to the Westminster Hall debate on protecting nesting sites for birds, which followed a parliamentary petition calling for netting hedgerows to be made a criminal offence. I know many of you were just as horrified as I was by the pictures circulating online from across the country of birds caught in such netting, particularly at Bacton cliffs in Norfolk. We simply can’t keep squeezing nature into smaller and smaller spaces and demand it fits in with our plans. In my contributions, I focused on the need to integrate wildlife into urban development, like swift bricks, and the impact of increasingly industrialised farming, such as fewer hedgerows, on biodiversity. You can read the debate here:. http://bit.ly/2W5eEuO