WNC migratory species profile
Chimney Swifts: downtown tonight

DESCRIPTION: Chimney Swifts (Chaetura pelagica), are five inches long with a twelve inch wingspan. They are sooty gray to black with lighter throats. Swifts roost on vertical surfaces and cannot perch or stand the way most birds do. They are a protected migratory species.

By Charlie Thomas

Please join me tonight for an evening spectacle. The chimney swifts are gathering for their annual migration to the Amazon basin. A couple of thousand swifts circle over the Grove Arcade every evening, as they have for many years, waiting for darkness to fall to go to their roost in a chimney. You can see them from anywhere near the arcade, occupying the space that Edwin Grove’s fourteen story building would have, had he lived. The prime viewing spot in downtown Asheville is at the front entrance of the Citizen-Times building. Stand on the sidewalk there and look at the top of the Grove Arcade and you will see a swirl of birds, twittering and swooping. Many people mistake them for bats at first, because they are very fast (hence their name) and their jerky flight is similar to that of bats. However, they are going in to roost for the evening, while the nocturnal bats are just waking up.

At dusk the swifts spiral in huge clouds which may seem random at first, but a closer look reveals shape and pattern. The funnel cloud soars high in the sky in every direction and can be seen by the other swifts who come to join. This behavior gives all of the swifts in the area a chance to make it back for the night. If one is flying in from Swannanoa, or just from Montford, a beacon in the sky must be a welcome sight.

A watcher will see the swifts gyrate in all directions, but always touching base at the chimney, where a few birds will duck in at each pass. As darkness nears, more will fall in, until at last they seem to be falling through a funnel. It was the swifts that Alfred Hitchcock filmed to make The Birds.

Swifts eat insects exclusively, and they catch them in flight. Each bird eats many thousands of insects each day, and they travel hundreds of miles each day to do it. (If you flew at 200 mph, you could travel hundreds of miles a day too.) It is not uncommon for a single swift to eat 25,000 mosquitoes per day.

The weakest, youngest, and oldest swifts go into the chimney first, while the stronger ones continue to fly. As darkness comes on, more and more go into the chimney, sometimes at the rate of a hundred birds per minute.

Although they are hard to count, on one recent evening there appeared to be two to three thousand swifts going into the chimney.

Swifts originally roosted in hollow trees, but as that habitat has declined, due mainly to deforestation, they have switched to chimneys. They are the survivors of a time when many species of birds could be seen in flocks of thousands. But when the forests were logged and then became log farms, most declined. The swifts had an alternate roosting and nesting site—chimneys. Now that habitat is declining as people cap their chimneys or erect steel-lined ones that swifts cannot cling to. Insecticides kill their food, and that too reduces the numbers of the birds. They are declining at the rate of about six percent per year.

They are protected by the US Migratory Bird Act, but the protection is for the birds themselves, not their habitat. So if a chimney owner — in this case the city of Asheville — decides to close or modify the chimney during the winter, no law is broken, but the swifts will die. So come to see them tonight, or else within the next few days. Sometime this fall, sometime soon, when the right southbound weather front comes through, they will depart en mass and unannounced for Peru where they will spend the winter. As insectivores, they must go where the insects are. They will be back in the spring. They will return to the chimney, and then spread out in order to nest — one pair per location.

IF YOU’RE GOING... The show starts around 7pm, peaks at 7:45, and is all over by dark at around 8. The sun sets a few minutes earlier each evening, and the birds will also go in earlier if there is a heavy cloud cover. The best viewing is on O. Henry Ave. across from the west entrance to the Grove Arcade.