Fake chimneys give migratory birds resting, nesting hollows
BIRMINGHAM, ALA. >> People from New England to Texas are building fake chimneys as nesting spots and migration motels for chimney swifts, little birds that are dwindling in number as the nation’s architectural landscape changes.
Old factories and schools with huge chimneys are being torn down, and most new houses don’t have chimneys. Many homeowners who do have chimneys are getting them lined with metal for fire safety or capping them to keep animals out.
So conservationists are building big chimney-like birdhouses as summer homes for swifts, which can rest only by using their toes as grappling hooks on a rough, vertical surface. Several are located around Birmingham, Alabama, where Greg Harber has been watching the birds for a decade as chimneys vanish.
It’s disheartening to see how many chimneys have been lost, “but it does give us hope that if we put them up that they will use them,” H ar ber said as swifts swirled near a real chimney. Because the 5.5-inch-long torpedo-shaped gray-brown birds sometimes called “flying cigars” spend most of their time flying at up to 35 mph, such migration gatherings offer some of the best chances to see them.
Though there are still an estimated 7.7 million adult chimney swifts, scientists estimatetheir totals have fallen by more than 70% since the 1960s, and by more than one-third just over three recent generations of the bird — about 16 years. That decline prompted the International Union for the Conservation of Nature to reclassify the species last year as vulnerable — the step before endangered.
“It fits right in with a lot of other data,” including a recent report that North America has lost about onequarter of its birds since 1970, said Jim Bonner, director of the Audubon Society of Western Pennsylvania.
It’s unclear how much of the chimney swifts’ decline is linked to chimney loss, especially since fake chimneys don’t always get used.
The flying insects swifts eat also appear to be declining. But Margaret Rubega, the Connecticut state ornithologist, thinks the birds’ decline is rooted in South America: “Chimney swifts are fundamentally a South American bird that visits North America for four months.”
Rube gasaida big problem is that scientists have only a few reports of small numbers of chimney swifts in the upper Amazon Basin, so they don’t really know where they winter, let alone what’s happening to them there.
Birmingham still has about 30 big chimneys where hundreds, even thousands, of migrating swifts rest en route to South America, said Lianne Koczur, Alabama Audubon’s science and conservation director.