A campaigner who walked the streets of London naked in a bare-skinned bid to raise awareness was beneath Oxford’s Bridge of Sighs when she learned that 100,000 people had signed her petition calling for ‘swift brick’ nest spaces to be mandatory in new housing developments.

West Oxfordshire nature writer Hannah Bourne-Taylor, whose close bond with the tiny migratory bird was forged when she nursed an injured swift back to health, wants the government to change the law so developers would have to install the ‘bricks’ in all new housing projects.

She has so far failed to convince Whitehall mandarins, who in a response to her petition on the UK Parliament website that it was a matter for local councils.

But more than 100,000 people have signed the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds-backed petition online.

Having reached that milestone, Hannah, 36, will now have to convince a panel of MPs that the matter should be given time to be debated in Parliament.

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“There’s no guarantee. It’s at the discretion of the petition committee,” she told the Oxford Mail.

She was in the shadow of Oxford’s Bridge of Sighs on Saturday afternoon, wearing a gold taffeta skirt dotted with messages of support scrawled in fabric outlines of swifts, when she learned that the online petition had passed 100,000 signatures.

“I don’t even have the words. I feel maybe I’m shaking with hope rather than desperation, which is a very nice change,” she said of her reaction to the campaign success.

“The whole campaign belongs to 100,000 people and not just me. It’s amazing.”

Nature writer Hannah’s relationship with the swift began in childhood when in the gloaming of a summer’s evening she would watch the feathered fighter pilots scream overhead in search of their insect prey.

Later, while living in Ghana, she rescued an injured swift, nursed him back to health by hand then released the bird into the skies.

Her book, Fledgling, chronicles the travails of persuading the palm-sized bird to trust her – as well becoming mum to a Mannikin Finch that nested in her hair before it too flew the proverbial and literal nest.

Since moving to rural Oxfordshire, she has forged a bond with the Keeper of Swifts at Oxford’s Museum of Natural History.

The Victorian building is home in the summer to dozens of pairs of nesting swifts, as well as one of the longest-running conservation monitoring projects in the world. Established by David and Elizabeth Lack in the 1940s, the summer swift colony has been monitored by researchers ever since.

While the museum is a safe haven for the birds, internationally the creatures have struggled. The RSPB says numbers have halved in the past two decades, in part blaming a lack of suitable nesting sites.

Hannah hopes her petition could change that. The ‘bricks’ she wants to make it compulsory to install in new developments are partly-hollowed out blocks that can sit flush with the wall, providing a cavity into which swifts and other birds can nest.

READ MORE: We meet Oxford's 'Keeper of Swifts'

“Originally, I felt so helpless in the face of this overwhelming crisis for the birds. I didn’t know what to do. That stalled me for a very long time,” she said.

“I thought I can’t do nothing. My motivation is extreme; it’s the idea of the last swift in this country looking at me and saying ‘you loved us and you didn’t do anything.”

While the idea of being eyeballed by a swift – christened the ‘devil’s birds’ by our ancestors thanks to their habit of flying high into the heavens – may unsettle some, for Hannah it was her day-to-day for weeks when she nursed one injured bird back to health.

She said: “They’ve got these eyes like polished planets or liquorish gum drops.” The birds also have long lashes, she said, to help keep out the sand as they cross the Sahara desert on their mile migrations from Africa to Europe.

Her campaign saw her strip naked, paint her body and deliver ‘The Feather Speech’ in Hyde Park last year before marching to Downing Street, where she called on the prime minister to recognise that ‘our walls also belong to adventurers’.

The bold move saw her photograph featured in the national newspapers and she was invited on to talk show host Piers Morgan’s Talk TV show.

Hannah cut a more conservative figure in Oxford on Saturday afternoon; wearing a t-shirt with the message ‘SAVE OUR SWIFTS’ marked in Day-Glo gaffa tape, as well as her gold dress onto which she had sewn dozens of hand-written messages of what the swift means to people.

To sign the petition, visit petition.parliament.uk/petitions/626737.