I’ve always had a healthy respect for birds. Well, in my more
self-delusional moments I call it healthy respect and in my more honest moments
I call it fearful disgust. Every time I see a bird my first thought is something
along the lines of “Ugh, gross. Go away, bird. No one wants you here.” I’ve
often wondered where this attitude comes from. It could have been from Alfred
Hitchcock’s “The Birds,” which terrified me when I was younger (even though I
only ever saw clips of it as a kid). It may have been from watching one of our
roosters attack my sister’s head (granted it seemed funny at the time, but it
could have caused residual emotional scarring). Or, perhaps, it came from being
stalked and attacked by our geese (they are dangerous and evil creatures, don’t
let anyone tell you different).
In any event, the fact of the matter is, I have a healthy
respect fearful disgust of birds. So, when my friend Kate invited me to “watch
the swifts” for her birthday event, I was not too excited. “Watching the swifts”
spans a one to two month period yearly in Portland, Oregon. Vaux Swifts are a
strange breed of bird (though, aren’t they all strange? They don’t have arms. I
know you’re thinking that they have wings instead, but that is just not the
same. It’s just not.) that has legs in the middle of its chest throwing off its
center of gravity when it tries to stand and no back claw such that they cannot
grasp branches. The result is that they spend the majority of their lives, in
fact nearly their entire lives, in flight. They can even sleep while flying.
It’s actually pretty incredible. But at night, when it’s time to rest and stop
flying, the birds roost in large communities, usually in tight spaces, such as
chimneys.
On Monday night last week I went to an elementary school in
NW Portland where a large defunct chimney on top of the school gym acts as a
roosting spot for the swifts. This chimney is a dedicated swift roost where
swifts have been coming for years and according to an Audubon Society volunteer
there that evening it is the largest swift community roosting chimney in North
America. A grassy hillside sits beside the gym and offers the perfect spot to
set up a blanket and small picnic to await the arrival of the swifts.
I arrived around 5:30 pm and claimed a spot on the lawn as space
quickly filled with more and more people arriving to watch the birds. As the
sun began to sink in the sky, small black dots appeared on the horizon. Soon
dozens of birds flew overhead, circling a four block radius around the school.
I remained unimpressed. Watching a few dozen or even a few hundred birds fly
into a chimney seemed a little silly and unimpressive. But as time passed and the
hands of the clock ticked closer and closer to the hour of sunset, more and
more birds joined the group circling the school. By 7:00 pm, just 40 minutes
from sunset, at least 10,000 birds wheeled overhead. And it was at this time
that I began to get nervous.
If you’ve never raised birds or seen the movie “The Birds,”
then you might not be able to appreciate the sheer terror the sight of
thousands of birds circling above you can cause. Honestly, it looked almost
exactly like a scene from “The Birds” and we all know that didn’t end well. But
regardless of my, perhaps, irrational
Soon the sky was turning a pale twilight shade of grey mixed
with lingering hints of orange and pink as the sun made its final descent and
the sky was filled with a tightly wheeling array of birds. Just as the last of
the
