The Frankfurt Swift Rescue Center sees its principal tasks in the expert veterinary care of injured swifts in need of help and in the species-appropriate hand-rearing of orphaned young swifts. The aim of every admission and course of treatment is to restore the bird’s ability to survive in the wild and to return it to nature.
As a bird that spends almost its entire life on the wing and migrates over long distances, the Common Swift is exposed to extreme demands. Assessing its injuries therefore requires highly specialised knowledge and experience – knowledge that the veterinarian and the staff of the Swift Rescue Center have gained while caring for more than 5,000 swifts by now. Certain injuries, for example wing fractures, have to be judged very differently and far more uncompromisingly than in many other wild birds. Only in this way can the swifts concerned be spared avoidable suffering, pain and harm, as required by Section 1 of the German Animal Welfare Act.
The same applies to the proper handling of uninjured young swifts that are brought in purely for rearing. They frequently end up in human hands, above all because their nest sites are being destroyed on an ever larger scale, but also when the parent birds are lost. Young swifts found on the ground always depend on human help, because the adults do not feed their young outside the nest. However, if that help does not take account of the very particular needs of these highly demanding patients (feeding insects exclusively, correct feeding technique and housing, etc.), the result is often exactly the opposite of what was intended: despite the great dedication of the people who find them, incorrect care frequently leads to irreparable damage and to the needless death of the birds.
Thanks to the expert care and veterinary treatment provided at the Frankfurt Swift Rescue Center, the great majority of the birds in our care can be released into the wild without difficulty and thus saved for the natural population.
The Swift Rescue Center also carries out extensive advisory and educational work on swifts, above all by telephone. Advice is given almost around the clock to people who have found swifts, as well as to veterinarians, animal shelters, other bird care centres, public authorities and anyone else with an interest in the subject. Contacts with scientific institutions such as the University of Frankfurt and with municipal bodies, and cooperation with the nature conservation authority, the veterinary office, the police and the fire brigade, are an important part of the administrative work at the Swift Rescue Center. In this context, meticulous management and archiving of patient records is also of great importance. Lists of birds admitted and of birds ringed are submitted every year to the Darmstadt Regional Council (Regierungspräsidium Darmstadt) and to the ringing centre of the Helgoland Bird Observatory, where the head of the centre, Christiane Haupt, is registered as a ringer.
In recent years, pursuing cases under the Federal Nature Conservation Act and the Animal Welfare Act has become an ever larger task. With the growing number of energy-efficiency refurbishments, the demolition of vacant buildings and the conversion of office buildings into housing, together with all the alterations this involves, the needs of birds that nest in buildings are disregarded again and again. Some owners do look for acceptable solutions in advance; but time and again it is neighbours or tenants who alert us to planned building work or to scaffolding that has already gone up. The Swift Rescue Center both advises those who seek help and prompts the authorities themselves to carry out inspections and intervene.
A by no means minor field of activity is the induction and training of new staff members and, more recently, occasionally also the supervision of interns and visiting trainees.