With her arms painted to look like feathers, Hannah Bourne-Taylor is describing her next mission. Every morning for several months, she will creep into a hedgerow near her Oxfordshire home in the darkness before dawn to feed some endangered birds and help them make it through the winter.
It is just the latest display of extraordinary commitment from a woman who last week marched topless through London to draw attention to the plight of Britain’s birds, and who previously allowed a fledgling to nest in her hair for 84 days.
With wild, waist-length hair, the statuesque 36-year-old had only body paint and nipple covers to preserve her modesty as she posed at the gates of Downing Street and marched through Hyde Park.
Hannah Bourne-Taylor (pictured) intends to creep into a hedgerow near her Oxfordshire home before dawn to feed some endangered birds and help them make it through the winter
She previously let a Swift nest in her hair for 84 days as part of her campaigning activities
Amid a swirl of pink smoke, she told onlookers at Speaker’s Corner she was a ‘go-between’ for swifts, which face extinction as their nesting sites are lost. This sombre fate is what has compelled this impeccably middle-class woman to take extreme measures.
‘People have described me as attention-seeking, but that’s precisely the point,’ she says today. ‘If Lady Godiva could ride naked through the streets, I could walk through London. It doesn’t matter what people think of me, as long as they hear the message.
‘I’ve had people commenting on my looks. But for me, it’s all about the birds. It might sound crazy, but I’m prepared to dedicate the rest of my life to them.’
She has previously detailed that love in a beautifully written memoir, Fledgling, which told of the eight years she spent in Ghana, where she hand-reared two baby birds. Hannah and her husband, called – perhaps inevitably – Robin, moved to rural West Africa in 2013.
Former Army captain Robin, awarded a gallantry medal for his service in Afghanistan, was a three-time winner of the Boat Race for Oxford and competed in the British Olympic rowing squad. ‘He’s like a superhero,’ Hannah says. ‘He understands my bond with nature.’
It is just the latest display of extraordinary commitment from a woman who last week marched topless through London to draw attention to the plight of Britain’s bird
The 36-year-old had only body paint and nipple covers to preserve her modesty as she posed at the gates of Downing Street
Hannah struggled with loneliness in Africa, and sought solace in writing, later helping Anne Glenconner pen her memoir A Lady In Waiting. But what brought Hannah back from the brink was a baby swift. She discovered it in the dust outside their home after a local had used a stick to destroy its nest.
Swift fledglings are particularly vulnerable to this kind of disaster: they cannot walk and cannot be carried by their parents back to the nest. So Hannah made an instinctive decision to raise it herself. She made a nest from a cardboard box and towels in the spare room and collected and froze termites to feed it. Her two weeks with the tiny bird before it finally took flight are inspiring, although – spoiler alert – it ends in an unexpected display of the natural world at its most cruel.
The swift, spreading its wings for the first time, is snatched mid-air by a marsh harrier. Thinking about it even now is enough to move Hannah to tears. Like any good story, however, there is a redemptive arc. Hannah soon stumbles across another fledgling, toppled out of its nest by a storm, this one a bronze-winged mannikin finch.
For 84 days, Hannah nursed the bird, letting it nest in her hair. ‘We spent 12 hours a day together. More than 1,000 hours,’ she recalls. ‘It sounds absurd. But finches are flock birds so I became the finch’s entire flock.’
Gradually, the bird became braver and sat on Hannah’s shoulder and hands. Then he, too, was returned to the wild. ‘I cried like a baby. It was heart-wrenching,’ she says. ‘But what those little birds taught me was to live in the moment. We’ve stopped doing that, stopped seeing all the little things around us which give us an instinctive understanding of the natural world.’
Swift fledglings are particularly vulnerable to their nests being destroyed: they cannot walk and cannot be carried by their parents back to the nest
Recently, Hannah spent 18 months fostering a crow named Constance after its wings were cut by a gamekeeper
Recently, Hannah spent 18 months fostering a crow named Constance after its wings were cut by a gamekeeper. And soon she will start clambering into that hedgerow, every morning, until spring.
‘Getting into the hedge itself is optional,’ Hannah admits, with a shrug and a wry smile. ‘But I think we all know by now that I’m ridiculous. And it’s just too good not to. The starlings start singing in the dark, and it’s like a secret reward for being in a hedge overnight when everyone else is in bed.’
Hannah is the first to admit she is a ‘crazy bird lady’ – but behind what she describes as the ‘theatre and sensationalism’ is something altogether more surprising, thoughtful and intelligent.
‘I call swifts “feathered patriots” because their aerodynamic body design directly inspired planes such as the Hurricane and the Spitfire that saved this country in the Battle of Britain. These birds are the elite fighters of the world and can fit in the palm of your hand.
‘All species have their place, but swifts fill British skies with joy.’
But their numbers have declined by more than half in the past 30 years, partly because modern – and recently insulated – buildings don’t have the nooks and crevices that they need for the nests they return to year after year. That’s why Hannah wants to make it obligatory for new buildings to include ‘swift bricks’ containing a nesting hole.
She hopes to get 100,000 signatures on a Government petition to trigger a parliamentary debate which, she hopes, could make swift bricks mandatory by law.
She posed in Hyde Park with signs highlighting the plight of the bird in her campaign called The Feather Speech
She posed outside Downing Street topless with paint on her body and birds adorning her back
‘Behind the emotion and swirling passion, I’m focused,’ she says. ‘As I did with the swift and the finch, I’m just taking it one problem at a time, hoping to hell it will pay off.’
Her own life has often been in flight, too. Born in Dorset, she attended nine different schools as her academic father, a biologist, moved around the country for work and research. As a result, she always felt ‘out of place and struggling to fit in’.
There was no television at home. Instead, her parents instilled in her a love of the outdoors and wildlife. ‘I didn’t know the names of Disney characters but I knew the Latin names for plants,’ she says. ‘My parents would weave in these magical facts about the outside world, which I lapped up.’
One routine imprinted itself in particular: on summer evenings the family would sit in their garden and watch the birds. ‘Those moments were magical,’ she says. ‘After the swifts return to Britain, in May, they have “screaming parties” through the summer when they dive-bomb through the skies with this really distinctive sound. I don’t know how anyone couldn’t be transfixed. I find it incredibly addictive.’ No matter where Hannah lived as a child, the swifts ‘became a constant – something I could rely on when everything else was in flux’.
That, and the little birds in Ghana – the ‘phantoms on my shoulder’ – are what drives her onwards.
‘I know I’m intense,’ she says. ‘I’m high-energy at the best of times and right now I’m riding this wave of publicity because I know how vital it is for the birds that I utilise it to their advantage.’
Hannah’s memoir, Fledgling, is published by Aurum at £11.80, available on Amazon.
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