Look quickly; Chimney Swift may disappear

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 12/08/2007 (6943 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

ST. ADOLPHE — It is the most spectacular of sights.

A dozen or so people have their faces pointed skyward, actually pointed toward a rooftop chimney, like a scene from Close Encounters of the Third Kind.

Then it’s all over in two seconds. A Chimney Swift, which can fly up to spectacular speeds of 170 km/h, comes into view. “There!” someone shouts anxiously.

Whoosh. It’s no sooner spotted than it soars down the chimney at breakneck speed, as if it expected to fly right through.

“Ahhh!” goes the crowd. It’s over. You may laugh, but it’s a rare thrill… and getting rarer.

The Chimney Swift may possess the heart of a lion, but it is becoming extinct under our noses. Its population has plunged 95 per cent in the last 40 years in Canada.

No one noticed its declining numbers until recently, because people rarely notice the swift. That’s because the bird never perches or even stands. Its deformed feet won’t allow it. So it flies all day, never stopping. A Chimney Swift will fly as much as 1,000 kilometres a day.

“They gather twigs on the fly, they mate on the fly, they feed on the fly (devouring up to 1,000 insects each day). Some literature even claims they sleep on the fly,” said Lewis Cocks, who initiated the local save-the-Chimney-Swift movement through the Manitoba Naturalists Society.

They even drink on the fly by skimming their bills over a water body.

Earlier this year, two swifts flew out the bottom of the chimney at St. Adolphe Parish in St. Adolphe. Father Gérald Michaud threw the church doors open hoping the birds would fly out, but they kept aiming skyward to escape, not horizontally.

Finally, after four days of non-stop flying, the two exhausted birds just hung by their claws to the back of a chair like bats, the same way they cling inside vertical walls of a chimney. The father simply picked them up in his hands and walked them outside.

Chimney Swifts once built nests in huge hollows of large, old-growth trees. That type of tree disappeared with European immigration and Chimney Swifts adapted to the red-bricked chimney the settlers built. The bird’s saliva is like glue and is used to paste twigs to the inside wall of a chimney to make small nests.

Pre-1960s brick chimneys are preferred. But today’s chimneys are being lined with metal piping for energy-efficient furnaces, destroying the rough interior the birds need to grip onto. Other homeowners are capping unused chimneys. And it’s rare that a chimney sweep visits a home for a cleaning and doesn’t try to sell the homeowner a screen guard for keeping out pests. The effect on the Chimney Swifts has been close to devastating.

They twist and turn and loop and reverse directions, all at top speed. They look similar to swallows but don’t fly as smoothly. They flutter their wings in quick little half-flaps. They make a soft chattering with their voices as they fly.

Good photographs of Chimney Swifts are hard to find. They fly at high levels of the air column and never stand still.

One evening in back of the Club Amical in St. Adolphe, 15 kilometres south of Winnipeg, several swifts dive-bombed down its chimney from above, but some also flew horizontally at the chimney, then darted down it like a wide receiver doing a quick down and out. They bed down in chimneys for the night.

“It was magic the first time I saw the bird go down a chimney. It was like a Harry Potter moment,” said Barb Stewart.

Stewart broke her arm this spring. In fact, it was during an interview with a Free Press reporter when she slipped on a patch of ice. When she heard about the call for volunteers to help monitor Chimney Swift sites — some 23 chimneys have been catalogued as sites in Winnipeg and the capital region — she decided it was something she didn’t need two arms to do.

She has spent 11 nights at the St. Adolphe site and 11 separate days recording the movements of the Chimney Swifts there.

The naturalists society wants to build an artificial tower for Chimney Swifts to roost, with help from an Environment Canada grant. The RM of Ritchot has offered them a place to build it. But Chimney Swifts are very particular. Towers have been tried elsewhere but often don’t work.

The best-known spot for sighting the swifts is the heating plant at the Selkirk Regional Hospital.

People frequently stop to ask what the birders, gathered in the parking lot like a tailgate party, are looking at, and each time Stewart nearly pounces, seeing another opportunity to educate and spread her enthusiasm about the Chimney Swift.

The Chimney Swift, a migratory bird, is regarded as a threatened species and experts expect it will be listed as endangered soon. Those wanting to know more can enquire at chimneyswifts@shaw.ca, or visit the Manitoba Naturalists Society Web page, www.manitobanature.ca/CHSW.html.

bill.redekop@freepress.mb.ca