Hanging Up Your Bird

I am always little and often hungry, but I am otherwise nothing like a Vaux's Swift, a few billion of which just showed up in town the other day. They're way up there in the sky flapping like mad and chirping and nabbing bugs out of the air. They're busy as hell.

Vaux's swifts are invariably described as cigar-shaped, even though the swifts have been around a lot longer than the stogies. And anyway it's not so much a cigar as a big poorly-rolled doobie, of the kind people used to roll when you could get an ounce for ten bucks. I am not cigar-shaped. I am Venus of Willendorf-shaped. This makes me less aerodynamic than a Vaux's swift. However it does mean if I land on the ground I will not roll very far, whereas if a Vaux's swift lands on the ground, it's totally screwed. Its feet are too little and its wings are too long to get airborne again. It would be like trying to levitate a canoe. If you ever do see a Vaux's swift on the ground you need to pick it up and heave it into the air and wish it the best of luck.

Other ways to tell me apart from a Vaux's swift: they get up first thing in the morning and work all the blessed day long. They don't rest. Most of our songbirds are plenty busy this time of year but they still park it from time to time and watch the world go by. Not those swifts. They've got nothing to park with. Their little feets can't perch, and the best they can do is sort of hang themselves up inside a tree or a chimney with their little claws, like a work shirt. They can't sit in a tree any more than a person with a conical butt can sit in a recliner. So all day long it's flappity flappity with a more or less constant chatter. I don't know what they're saying but it doesn't vary much. Probably bugs bugs bugs or yum yum yum.

That's a lot of work but it's worse than that. They have no plan for retirement. Some swifts can go ten months without landing. They sleep in the sky. If I woke up and discovered myself high in the sky I would freak out, but swifts are cool with it, and would take it in stride if they had anything to stride with. Yes, swifts eat, sleep, drink, and have sex in the air. They do make nests if they find someplace to hang themselves up in. But it's not going to be a branch or anything they can usefully weave nesting materials around--they have to hang themselves up somewhere and glue sticks to the surface with their own spit. If you have a nesting swift in your chimney and discover a baby bird in your fireplace, you should pick it up and stick it higher up your chimney, and it will keep skritcheting higher until it finds its nest again.

They've stuck little hats on birds to detect if they really sleep on the wing and discovered they even have REM sleep, during which they dream about showing up for the final exam on bug ID even when they hadn't gone to class all year, or giving a speech (yum yum yum) without any feathers on. Sometimes birds sleep with half their brains and keep the other half on the lookout, but sometimes they shut down the whole computer, usually while on a nice updraft. And maybe that works out a lot of the time, but if it doesn't, they can always make more swifts.

Keep an eye on your fireplace though.

A Precipitation Of Swifts

On a warm September evening, I joined several hundred of my fellow humans for a picnic on the lawn in a rosy twilight under a gentle drizzle of Vaux's Swift poop. An individual Vaux's Swift poop, like an individual Vaux's Swift, is a fairly insubstantial item, but there were thirty thousand of the tiny birds swirling above us for over an hour, and that can add up.

The Chapman Elementary School in NW Portland is the site of the largest gathering of Vaux's Swifts in the country. They come from miles around to congregate for a few hours in the vicinity of their dormitory, the large chimney stack of the school. At some point they will begin to drop into the chimney in a large, whirling vortex, and there they will cling all night, side by each, all thirty thousand of them, until it's time to fly out again in the morning. For much of the month of September, Chapman can lay claim to having the softest chimney in America.

That's pretty much it for the swifts; they fly, they eat bugs, and they cling. They don't have the right kind of feet for perching in trees, so they have to be good at flying, and they are, reaching speeds of up to a hundred miles per hour, which is why they aren't called Vaux's Pokeys. When you lie on your back and gaze up at a swirl of swifts, they shoot into the distance and vanish utterly, only to reappear elsewhere in the sky. You can go ahead and claim to be attending one of the wonders of nature, but it's like looking at your own eyeball floaters. Their numbers accumulate with the dusk, swooping in drifts towards the chimney and back up again, until some sort of signal prompts the first one to drop inside--probably the one closest when the music stops--and the feathered cyclone begins. Until then, they're all arranging themselves into their proper cliques, like schoolchildren milling about outside the cafeteria, loathe to be stuck at the dork table when the doors open up. Also, if they're an ordered society, which it appears they are, they are all getting their last poops out before bedtime. It's only polite.

There is a third species involved in the festivities, the Cooper's Hawks, and they can perch just fine. They dot the tall trees down the way, shooting the breeze and scratching themselves, until one of them gets the idea, hey--what say we pop down to Chapman and get a little take-out? And so, one at a time, they do, setting up on the rim of the chimney and craning their heads around, waiting, timing, and then they pop straight up and nab a swift and go home to watch the game with the boys. The humans down below put their fried chicken down long enough to boo lustily, but I'm more tolerant. I like what I hear about Cooper's Hawks. Male Coopers pitch woo to their conspicuously larger womenfolk for up to a month before scoring, and they do it by bringing them food. That works on me, too. So I can live with the idea that when the swifts, all thirty thousand of them, do roll call later in the evening, they're going to come up three short.