LONGLISTED FOR THE WAINWRIGHT PRIZE FOR CONSERVATION 2025

'Reading Hannah’s story, compellingly told, you will fall in love with these increasingly endangered birds, true masters of the sky.’ Jane Goodall, PhD, DBE

The inspirational story of a bird lover who became a nature-warrior in a David v Goliath battle to save swifts from extinction.

Nature Needs You tells the compelling story of how Hannah, without campaigning experience, funding or contacts, set out to save swifts from extinction in the UK. Her mission is to change the law and make ‘swift bricks’ mandatory so that the birds who nest in our walls will have a future in Britain. Nature Needs You delves into the highs and lows of trying to win hearts and minds, grab the news agenda with her naked Feather Speech, win Caroline Lucas and Lord Zac Goldsmith’s support, navigate meetings with Secretaries of State and debates in the Houses of Parliament, survive the trolling and midnight self-doubt and raise a petition with the requisite 100,000 signatures for a Parliamentary debate. At stake, with a decline in numbers of over 60% since 1995, are the birds who have become our symbol of summer, the swifts screaming in the skies above us.

Steeped in love for the wild, by a talented writer, Nature Needs You is a clarion call to save the nature on our doorsteps and to prove that passion can be a superpower in bringing change to nature-depleted Britain. Raw, funny, self-deprecating and unstoppable in turn, this is nature writing with the pace of a thriller. Hannah is now knocking at the door of the new Labour Secretary of State for Housing, in the hope that, where Rishi Sunak and Michael Gove failed, Angela Rayner and Matthew Pennycook will save our swifts.

‘I applaud Hannah’s book; her inner steel and her sassy take on conservation are inspiring. I am so heartened that there are courage-driven young women holding nature in the light so that it WILL be seen by the powerful.’ Mary Colwell, author of Curlew Moon

‘This book might make you scream. It is the story of a fight that started with a promise to a small bird. It is about bird spirit and the spirit of a very singular human. Hannah Bourne-Taylor has a searing eye for both truth and charlatans.’ Keggie Carew, author of Beastly

‘A wonderful book that will make you furious, hopeful and inspired by turns. Buy it, read it and then become an activist yourself.’ Roger Morgan-Grenville, author of Shearwaters

Bourne-Taylor, Hannah

Nature Needs You

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