Monroe's swifts stayed away this year due to predator threat

By MICHAEL WHITNEY
Published September 25, 2019

MONROE — Predatory merlins have frightened away the Vaux’s swifts from their popular roosting spot in Frank Wagner Elementary’s chimney.

Now the question is whether the birds will ever come back.

Their practical no-show this year is evident in observers’ nightly logs: Zero. Zero. Zero.

No swifts entered the chimney starting from Aug. 26 through most of September. The numbers plummeted after the first night’s count on Aug. 21.

Usually, a few thousand swifts would dive in each night. Last fall’s cumulative count at Wagner surpassed 140,000.

The Vaux’s swifts are winging down the West Coast, moving from Canada to Mexico. They’ll do the reverse in the spring. The little birds cover 150 or more miles in a day before collectively swooping into select chimneys and trees for nighttime rest.

“The swifts have abandoned the chimney. This is serious,” said Larry Schwitters, the nation’s pre-eminent Vaux’s swifts expert, with clear disappointment.

Continued

Migratory bird struggles for shelter as chimneys torn down

GILLIAN FLACCUS Associated Press

PORTLAND, Ore. (AP) — A crowd of several hundred people gathered in the growing darkness outside Chapman Elementary School in Portland, Oregon, before the first Vaux's Swift darted into view high above.

Minutes later, thousands of the tiny birds were swooping and swirling like a cloud of pulsating black ink as they circled a tall brick chimney silhouetted by the fading light.

The humans below, watching from a patchwork of blankets and empty picnic baskets, cheered as the flock poured into the chimney all at once, like water spiraling down a drain.

The swifts' noisy migratory stopover each fall has made this chimney famous with bird lovers as far away as Europe and is a quirky Portland tradition so embraced by locals that the school keeps the diminutive Vaux's Swift as its mascot.

But in recent years, fewer of the beloved birds have shown up. The birds were already struggling because of the destruction of old-growth forests and now some scientists believe they are being further impacted by the destruction of old brick chimneys along their migratory path.

The birds can fly for about 100 miles at a time between stops as they travel from Canada to Mexico and back each year and roost in large numbers in tight, enclosed spaces because their body temperature drops at night.

But the decades-old smoke stacks they've adopted are getting torn down and capped off along the West Coast because of redevelopment, seismic concerns and an urban annoyance with swift poop and noisy flocks. When a chimney that's been a major roosting site disappears, no one is sure exactly where they go.

Read on 

Thousands of birds stop in Northern State smokestack on migration

Photo: Wikipedia

That dark cloud pouring from a smokestack at the Northern State Hospital site isn't smoke — it's birds.

Vaux's Swifts, a small species of bird, gather in the 120-foot smokestack every year around September on their way south for the winter. More than 200,000 of them were counted there last year.

This means the former mental-hospital campus could be the most significant roost site in the birds' entire 2011 migration, according to Vaux Happening, an Audubon Society and community science project that tries to find Vaux's Swift roosts in North America.

Continued:  http://seattletimes.com/html/localnews/2019160960_swifts15m.html

More Vaux's swift information:

http://www.allaboutbirds.org/guide/Vauxs_Swift/id

http://www.birdlife.org/datazone/speciesfactsheet.php?id=32198