Swifts

Chimney Swift

Chaetura pelagica
Call it the Montezuma National Wildlife Refuge of Chimney Swifts. That’s how Jim Kimball describes the big chimney at York Central School in Greigsville. Late each summer into fall, in much the way Snow Geese use Montezuma as a stopover, swifts use the chimney as a roosting site before migrating south. As illustrated by the maxima below, the chimney is used by as many as 1,300 swifts at a time – the largest such annual roost known to birders in our region. Kimball, a lecturer in music at SUNY-Geneseo, is an avid birder who has done much to help document the birds of Livingston County. He first noticed the swifts in 2002 while watching his son practice each evening with the York Junior Knights football team on a nearby field. He has been monitoring the roost every year since. The birds arrive just after the sun sets, coming in “waves,” at first darting and fluttering through the air, occasionally feinting as if they are about to go into the chimney, then veering abruptly away. Finally, as if by some prearranged signal, the birds begin to disappear inside. “In the last five minutes it can look like a huge funnel,” Kimball said. As for actually counting the birds, “all you can do is estimate,” he notes. Kimball’s approach: Count ‘em by tens.Though the York Chimney Swifts are most evident in fall, spring migrants have also been known to congregate in large numbers in our region. For example, several hundred stubby little birds that looked like “winged cigars” had been “putting on an entertaining show of aerial acrobatics over downtown Rochester for the past couple of weeks,” John Brown reported in his Birds Afield column on 1 June 1961. They were migrating Chimney Swifts, and “one center of their activity has been the tall, square chimney on the Lawyer’s Cooperative Publishing Company on Broad Street, near Exchange. On several afternoons starting about May 18, flocks of several hundred swifts have filled the air over the building and amazed watchers nearby by suddenly diving full speed into the chimney, only to stream out again a few minutes later.” Brown speculated this may have been caused by a combination of cold weather and the razing of several old downtown buildings, reducing available roosting sites.
Background
Chimney Swifts, with their constant “chittering” in flight, and stubby, cigar-shaped bodies with long wings are easily identifiable in the skies of downtown Rochester and outlying towns and villages. This is one of the most aerial of all landbirds, spending virtually all of its time in the air except when at the nest or roosting. It gathers nest material on the wing, breaking off small twigs with its feet while flying through branches, and even bathes on the wing by gliding down to water “in a long, shallow angle on stationary wings, smacking the water with breast and whole undersurface of (the) body,” then bouncing up and shaking the water from its plumage. It breeds throughout much of southern Canada east of Saskatchewan, south through Texas and all states to the east, and is newly established as a breeder in southern California. Once limited to nesting in scattered hollow trees in old-growth forests, this species benefited greatly from the arrival of European settlers, adapting to the multitude of nesting cavities provided by the chimneys on their buildings. Also uses air vents, old open wells, abandoned cisterns, outhouses, garages, silos and barns. Nest material is glued to the wall with the birds’ saliva. More recently, however, populations have been in decline as new chimneys prove less suitable for nesting. “Changing building practices in the U.S. have resulted in more and more new homes built with covered, round, insulated sheet metal flues for both furnaces and fireplaces (too narrow for nesting swifts…) in place of the open brick chimneys favored as nest sites.” Moreover many homeowners have capped previously open chimneys with wire grates to exclude rain and animal pests.These birds winter in the upper Amazon basin. During migration, flocks numbering in the thousands have been observed circling in “large tornado-like flocks above roosting chimneys at dusk,” descending “in every-narrowing vortices into their depths to spend the night” – just as Kimball has observed at York. (BNA 646: 1, 8, 12, 18)
Local history
By Eaton’s time, these remarkable, beneficial birds had “practically abandoned the hollow trees which they occupied both for roosting and nesting sites before the advent of white men in America.” Already they had adapted to the chimneys of human habitations. “Nearly every village or city can boast at least one large chimney on church or schoolhouse that harbors multitudes of swifts every night late in summer,” Eaton (1914) observed. “It is an interesting sight to watch these swifts as they wheel about such an old chimney in the August and September evenings and, when the magic moment arrives, pour down its capacious mouth in a living cascade.” So noisy was the “roaring” sound, that people would screen over their chimneys.He considered them abundant summer residents in Monroe and Livingston counties, and common summer residents in Wayne. (Eaton II: 170-173, I: county charts)R. E. Horsey, in his listing of birds seen at Rochester and Monroe County from 1913 to 1936, indicated average counts of three to 15 birds, with a maximum count of 200, on dates ranging from 19 April to 12 October.When Leo Tanghe analyzed 1,665 outings within a 50-mile radius of Rochester by Genesee Ornithological Society members from 1951-1954, he found this species reported 330 times, from the second week of April through the end of October, with about half the sightings (161) in May, when highest average counts of 10-20 birds occurred. (KB 5:69: 4A-4B)In 1953, Tanghe listed this as an abundant breeder in the Rochester area, specifically mentioning the Burroughs-Audubon Wildlife Sanctuary and Maplewood Park as nesting locations. (GOS, May/August 1953)
Status
The Monroe County annotated list (1985) described this as a regular, common summer resident. So did Fox in his Birds of Livingston County (1998).
Occurrence
Spring: The Monroe County annotated list (1985) indicated a range of arrival dates from 10 April (1952) to 14 May, with a mid range, or “normal arrival time” of 26 April to 5 May.
Spring maxima: 600 on 9 May 1948 (Wolf) at Conesus Lake. (GOS, May/July 1948) 1,000 on 8 May 1956 (R. Dobson) at Spring Street in Rochester. (GOS, January-June 1956) 400 on 19 May 1959 (Starling) “wheeling around the sites of demolished buildings in downtown Rochester.” (KB9:79) 400 on 22-23 May 1997 (C. Cass) at Cobbs Hill. (GOS, July/August 1997) Summer/breeding status: During the first BBA project, evidence of breeding was found in more than two-thirds of the blocks in our region. Much of the decrease during the second project was along the west lakeshore, where there was an increase in blocks with no evidence of breeding at all.

Though primarily adapted to using man-made chimneys, several dozen swifts were seen flying in and out of a dead hollow tree near Jaycox Creek in Livingston County in June 1973, and were presumably nesting in it. (Fox, p. 59)Swifts have apparently been using the York Central School roost for quite some time, Kimball related. The school’s custodian came out one evening to see what Kimball was looking at. The custodian, who thought the birds were bats, said they had been coming to the chimney all the years he had worked there.
Summer maxima: 110 on 26 July 2006 (Kimball) at York Central School, Greigsville. (LG, September 2006) 127 on 9 August 2004 (Kimball) at York Central School, Greigsville. (LG, October 2004) 228 on 13 August 2005 (Kimball) at York Central School, Greigsville. (LG, October 2005) 120 on 13 August 2006 (Kimball) at York Central School, Greigsville. (LG, October 2006) 500 on 23 August 2007 (Kammermaier) at Greigsville. (LG, October 2007) 225 on 29 August 1992 (S. Taylor) at Brighton. (LG, September 1992)
Fall: The Monroe County annotated list (1985) indicated a range of departure dates from 27 August to 19 October (1959, 1976), with a mid range, or “normal departure time” of 5 to 30 September. Subsequently, two on 26 October 2001 (Niven) at Braddock Bay (GOS, January 2002) were later. (Note: Reference is made to one on 8 November 1974, but apparently no verification report was filed – KB 25:37) Eighteen on 8 October 1978 (N. Henderson, Lloyd, Sunderlin) at Irondequoit Bay (GOS, December 1978) and 26 on 19 October 2005 (Kimball) at Greigsville were good tallies for late dates. (KB56:69)
Fall maxima: 790 on 10 September 2006 (Kimball) at York Central School, Greigsville. (LG, October 2006) 420 on 12 September 2004 (Kimball, Briggs) at York Central School, Greigsville. (KB55: 52; GOS, December 2004) 750 on 12 September 2007 (Kimball) at York Central School, Greigsville. (LG, November 2007) 1,300 on 24 September 2005 (Kimball) at York Central School, Greigsville. (LG November 2005) 1,170 on 26 September 2002 (Kimball) at York Central School, Greigsville. (KB 53:50) 1,100 on 1 October 2005 (Kimball) at York Central School, Greigsville. (LG December 2005) 1,000 on 2-3 October 2002 (Kimball) at York Central School, Greigsville. (GNR) 350 on 3 October 2006 (Kimball) at York Central School, Greigsville. (LG, December 2006)
Misc.
John Brown’s experiences with these birds nesting in his chimney at Scottsville made for some interesting columns over the years. In July 1965, Brown described trying to write his bird column despite “a loud, shrill chattering noise emanating from the fireplace” of his Scottsville home. “It sounds as though something vital had suddenly gone wrong with a piece of machinery like the water pump on a car.” (BA, 22 July 1965) Ignoring suggestions that a screen be placed over his chimney, Brown had allowed the swifts to set up housekeeping there the previous month. “The weight of a growing brood of swiftlets apparently became too great for the nest, and it fell with its contents to the top of the iron damper just above the fireplace proper where the young are being fed every few minutes by the parent birds,” Brown reported. “The loud and healthy screeching that occurs at every feeding would seem to indicate that none of the young Chimney swifts was seriously shaken up in their impromtu descent.” When this happened again in 1982, Brown was able to study the vocal development of young Chimney Swifts at very close range. “At first the young made a noise like escaping steam when the parent birds arrived with food, something like young barn owls, but now they greet the arrival of a meal with a chippering that becomes more and more like the notes of the adults. . . . The feeding process starts at dawn and continues until after dark.” One morning “they were still being fed at 3:30 a.m.” Yet another year, “a nest fell down when the damper was open, and my wife closed the living room doors to confine a half dozen tiny, ashy birds,” Brown recounted. (BA, 29 July 1982) “On my return, I put them back in the chimney in small berry boxes and all survived.”

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