When I put together the birdwatching logbooks, I try and represent as many bird families as possible, but it’s always fun to include species which have notable characteristics, or interesting back stories. This is a a city title that I’m assembling, so it’s good to have a hirundine (swallow or martin) or a [similar-looking but actually unrelated] swift as their shape is so distinctive, and they tend to flock making them an easy bird to notice. It also encourages people to look up; always a bonus in our screen-heavy visual world.
Swifts are difficult to sell as they are invariably dull of plumage, and all their amazing features such as performing pretty much every aspect of their life (eating mating drinking sleeping) while flying, are beyond simple aesthetics making them a difficult group to illustrate engagingly. Swallows have iridescent plumage but mainly on their backs which as an observer on the ground, we rarely see. They are a more interesting shape though, unlike the swift I have chosen for this logbook, which has the charming alternative moniker of a “flying cigar”.
Can you see why? This is the Chimney Swift, and like its swiftie cousins, rarely touches terra firma. These ones are special as they roost in chimneys – like many rooftop species, utilising the tubular structure and insulating properties of brick chimneys to serve as a proxy for hollow trees. They can’t perch as such, so cling to the rough surface inside the flue, often in huge numbers. As with many of our urban birds, demolition and regeneration severely disrupts the roosting and nesting sites of Chimney Swifts, which if that were not enough of a concern, the insectivorous swifts, swallows and martins consume trillions of flying insects and their decline means more mozzies, midges, aphids and flies for us humans to deal with.
Chimney Swifts migrate between their wintering grounds in western South America and their breeding grounds on the eastern side of the United States and Canada. They pair up for a season to raise one or two broods of 3-5 young. Both parents make a nest using tiny twigs shaped in to a half-saucer, stuck to the wall of the chimney with a glue-like substance from their salivary glands.
Their inaccessibility means they are poorly studied and therefore conservation efforts are difficult to coordinate. There seem to be some organisations building swift boxes, and I had no idea there was a World Swift Day on June 7th, but it’s in the diary for next year. We have a number of swift towns and cities here in the UK, but there doesn’t seem to be the same thing across the pond.
Have you got swift colonies near you?
Happy Blogtober Day 4 folks! And thanks for all the love on yesterday’s post ❤️
There is a small church behind my parent’s house. It’s one of those churches that have been around forever and it has a small graveyard with a large yew tree behind it. There are multiple times across my childhood where I have stood under the canopy of the yew tree with my dad and looked into the fields beyond, watching swifts flying around in the sky. It always made Dad really happy to see them – almost like a sign that everything was going to be okay, that ,despite everything, the swifts had returned!
That field, unfortunately, is now a housing estate and it has been a few years since we have seen swifts around there. Still, my dad still wanders up to the church on spring evenings – just in case.
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What a lovely memory, and sad that the swifts have been displaced. My friend lives in a Swift Town and it’s amazing to watch them in number – they nest in the church there. It’s such a sound of summer, and I hope they return to the church near your folks at some point 🙂
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