Chimney Swifts - Can't Perch, Can't Walk, and Barely Lands

0:00This week I watched roughly a thousand chimney swift disappear into a school chimney and it took two or three hours. What's amazing is we were standing there, a whole group of people got there. It was chimney swift night and everyone was waiting for this to happen. Spent hours on a picnic table, on a blanket. We were on a picnic table kind of thing sitting there watching it. And what it feels like when you're watching this is it looks like tornadoes of birds forming and going down into the chimney and then a few fly around and tornado again and then few go in and it was just so amazing. There was also this feeling of community with it because there were several hundred people there who were cheering this on, cheering what was going on. And here's the strange thing about the bird.

1:00It can't perch, it doesn't walk. It spends almost an entire life in the air and then on summer nights, just a few nights, it does this one miraculous thing. So let's start with the basics because the basics are the weirdest part. The chimney swift eats in the air, it drinks in the air, it bays by skimming the water and flushing water up onto its wings. It mates in the air, it eats in the air and its feet are built for one thing only, clinging to a rough vertical surface. It can't perch on a wire, it can't hop around in the ground like a robin can. If it's not flying, it's clinging to a wall. That's it, those are the only two settings that that bird has. And some people call them the flying cigar because they got stubby little bodies, long curved wings and no visible neck. And so it just does essentially this one job.

2:00When you actually see what it looks like at the roost, it's not one kind of clean event. It's a long staging process. Birds from all over the surrounding area will start circling. They chatter, you can hear them making chattering noises over your head. They start gathering altitude and then start losing again as they come close to the chimney. And for a long stretch, nothing happens. You see this for a couple of hours where they're skimming around this chimney. Now in my particular case, it was a chimney that was at a local school. It was amazing. It's the sound of the flocking birds flying over your head for hours and hours and hours. It's amazingly fascinating thing right by itself. And then what happens is a few birds start to peel off and they start to trickle down into

3:05the chimney. Just like, maybe they're checking the older ones are checking to see if it's safe or something like that. And then as the night goes along, these flocks of funnels get tighter and tighter and start to go in. And sometimes it will just, like I said, it takes several hours. Then eventually, sunset comes. And right at the point where it's almost a complete loss of sunlight, suddenly the big bulk majority of comes in. They flock into the chimney itself. Then there were just a few stragglers after that. But nobody's leading it. There's no bird that's in charge. They behave more like water going down a drain, like the flocks of birds making the decision as a whole. And it's so fascinating to look at. It's just amazingly hard to look away from it. So here's the thing that's going on. When the most people don't know anything about this, and when I told people in other parts of the country about what happened that night and showed them videos of it, they said,

4:09I'd never even heard such a thing. So what will happen is as they go into the chimney, they go into, and they cling on the inside of the rough brick using their tail feathers as a brace, it's kind of the same trick that woodpeckers use on a tree trunk. Woodpeckers, if you don't know, they have less fingers than most birds. And so they can grab onto a tree and then they use their tail to sort of wedge themselves against the tree so they can pack. What's happening now is these birds are flying into, I mean, it's like a thousand birds going into just what looks like a normal size school chimney, they pack in tight. They overlap, row after row. It's like shingles on a roof. And it looks a little bit from pictures I saw that like bats on the inside of the chimney itself. And what they do is they pack close together, their body heat helps keep the temperature inside of the chimney and helps keep them warm.

5:09It's a survival status and they just keep tightly in together. I can't even imagine that many birds in that particular chimney. So the part that's interesting about this whole part is that for a long time, nobody knew exactly where the chimney swish went every fall. They would vanish completely and no one could trace them. And then it became sort of one of those oranthology mysteries. And then it turned out that in Peru, specifically in the upper Amazon Basin, there was a, it's on the western parts of the continent, researchers started banding the swists by the hundreds and tracing where they actually went. Where did they go? And those tiny leg bands ended up tracing them to where there was a missionary contact in Peru confirmed what they had only been guessing at. And more recent tracking had filled in even more parts of the pictures.

6:11It turns out that the birds don't even sit still once they get in there. They spend weeks in Peru. They drift east to Venezuela and then Brazil and then the rest of the season before they make the long trip back up north. So when you hear about that, you know, just like I said, it's always amazing when you hear about birds and how far they fly and how they come back and then nest. So essentially they spend winters in South America and then they come up to the, to the Eastern United States, pretty much the entire east of the rocky coast, rocky mountains have them. But here in the north woods, the swifts start showing back up here in mid to late April. And then the biggest push is somewhere around May. Then the fall departure runs anytime from mid August through early October, which puts what I saw sort of right in the middle of that late summer staging window before they head south for good. So if you want to see this for yourself, what you do is you pick a late summer evening,

7:13find it old school or church chimney, that's your best shot and then go there, write before sunset and you know, give it a little bit of time. The show starts building up like I said, when we got there, we saw some birds. A good number of them and some were going in early, but as the evening continued more and more kept showing up. So they're in this gathering phase. And some of these events, you know, may last a couple of weeks, may last a couple of days or maybe for one night only. In my particular town, they had a chimney swift watching night that they had planned knowing on the behavior because we go to this particular school year after year and see this come in. And so they announced they were ready to go for this. In our particular case, our local DNR and the chimney swift working group run an annual event called the Swift Night Out. That's what I was at this year. And it's really amazing. You show up at that roost at dusk and then people count the birds going in.

8:18That's all they do. I can't imagine because like I said, they swirled around like a tornado. I don't know how you count it. For a while, my friend and I were trying to just keep our eyes. We picked one bird. Let's just follow it as it goes. You know, and so we'll go into the swirl tornado and then it would come back up and it would go out in the sky. And it's really amazing. I don't know how anyone counts how many swifts we saw. But swifts have lost, the chimney swists have lost a lot of their original habitat, which used to be old, hollowed out trees before people started building chimneys. And now with the chimneys, that helped the chimney swists find new homes. But now we don't build chimneys on schools anymore. And so this is becoming harder for them to find places to go. And so these areas, you know, like I said, now that we know that there's a school right here, the chimney swists come here, that helps researchers be able to figure out how many swifts do we have, how many, you know, population is going up or it's going down.

9:23And so a lot of these roots, like I said, we don't build a lot of chimney roofs anymore. A lot of them are being torn down. That sometimes people will put caps on them so that birds and bats can't get in them. And so again, they're losing their habitat for that. In my particular case, the school is deciding that they're going to rebuild the school. And everyone started worrying, well, what about the chimney? Because every year we get the chimney swifts coming here and it's sort of become a community event in my neighborhood. And the school was like, well, it's going to cost us $40,000 to build a chimney we don't need. But do we do it in order to help the chimney swifts continue to come here every year? And then in our case, they decided that they were going to build the chimney swift. I don't know if they were raising money, but I suspect that they were. So like I said, the next time you're near some old chimney at dusk, maybe in August, early September, give it a look, you know, maybe go 20 minutes before sunset and see if

10:25anything happens. So I hope you enjoy this episode. It's pretty amazing to have a bird that can't stand, that can't walk, that can't perch on a branch, but spends its entire life in the air. And when it's not in its air, it's clinging on to the side of a chimney or the inside of an old snag of a tree. I hope you enjoyed this week. You can let me know at JillfromtheNorthwoods.com. Do you have chimney swifts where you are? Like I said, pretty much everywhere in the United States, it's east of the rocky coast gets them. And so you will be able to find maybe a swift watching night somewhere near you. Thanks so much. I appreciate you being out there and have a great day.