OPB · https://www.opb.org/article/2026/07/19/israeli-paraglider-tries-to-save-swift-birds-nesting-in-western-wall/
A paraglider has spent twenty years wedging nest boxes into the Western Wall for swifts that return each spring on their own. The city rising around them isn't as reliable.
The turtledove, the swallow, and the crane observe the time of their coming; but my people don't know Yahweh's law.
Jeremiah 8:7
On July 19, 2026, NPR told the story of Amnonn Hahn, 72, an Israeli paraglider who has spent two decades bolting army ammunition boxes into the crevices of Jerusalem's Western Wall, turning them into nests for common swifts. Researchers believe the birds have nested there since Herodian times, two thousand years, at least 88 nests counted recently.
Hahn didn't set out to keep a migration alive. In 1999 he was swept into a thermal during a paragliding contest and circled with swifts for 25 minutes, up to 6,500 feet. "It was like magic," he says. He quit importing motorcycles and started building nest boxes instead. When nestlings fall from overcrowded sites, Israel's Wildlife Hospital calls him, and he fosters them into strangers' nests, where the host birds feed the newcomer first.
Swifts fly 2,800 miles from Africa and reunite with their mate only once a year, at the nest. Everything else happens on the wing: eating, sleeping, mating. It is a narrow, exacting fidelity that asks nothing of the bird except to return, on schedule, to the same crack in the same wall.
Jeremiah wasn't impressed by that. He was needling his own people with it.
A swift never read a covenant or heard a law recited at a mountain. It returns because returning is what its whole created life points toward, no instruction required. Israel had the law spoken to them for centuries and still needed reminding. The failure is what happens when creatures with will and memory can't manage what one without either does automatically.
Tel Aviv's skyline is going up in glass, and Hahn can already see where that ends: no crevices, no ledges, nowhere left in a taller city for something small to land. He has spent his life buying that room back, one ammunition box at a time. It is unglamorous work, and the only kind that keeps a two-thousand-year-old appointment from finally breaking.