A Healthy Respect for the Birds

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

fearful disgust of birds, everyone readily agreed with my assessment that, at the very least, we were “all in the poop zone” – not a place anyone really wants to find themselves. As more and more swifts filled the sky above the school, large predatory birds came to perch on the lip of the brick chimney. These falcons were clearly waiting for the show to start and we were told by the ever helpful Audubon representative that they would wait for the swifts to begin flying into the chimney and would then snatch one or two for an evening meal.

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

fiery color faded away the birds began circling in an ever tightening circle around the opening of the chimney. And then, like a slender cyclone, the birds began funneling into the red brick chimney. The air above turned a pure black, not from the darkening sky, but from the sheer number of birds flying so closely together. Birds that missed the opening on the first pass would swoop back into the cyclone higher up and try again. For about thirty minutes the dark tornado raged above the chimney as approximately 20,000 swifts filled the small space below. The falcons each picked off a few birds to the mixed cheers and gasps of the crowd, but the real showmen of the night were the swifts. By 8:00 pm all the swifts were safely tucked away in the chimney and night had fully fallen. Those small birds were a sight never to be forgotten and one that filled even this most determined bird hater with awe and amazement. By the end of September, approximately 30,000 swifts will be roosting in this chimney every night and I can’t wait to go back and see the show again.