The Northern Black Swift 
as the nest of the long-sought Black Swift. Appearing, as it did, in the 
venerated columns of “The Auk,” this account met with ready acceptance, 
and was copied far and wide,—so widely, in fact, that the tradition still 
persists in heavy monographs and foreign tomes. 
Of course, those whose natures are tinged with a wholesome skep¬ 
ticism soon made out that the nest in question belonged, not to the 
dashing tyrant of the skies, but to the more prosaic Purple Martin 
(.Progne subis), a bird at that time little known in the West. Major 
Bendire correctly diagnosed the case upon a visit to Seattle in May, 
1894, and published his opinion in the authoritative “Life Histories,” 
which appeared in 1895 under government auspices. This veteran nest- 
finder, the ranking officer of the whole oological corps, had come the 
nearest of any one to finding the nest of our elusive black heroes. The 
gist of his account is worth quoting: “The only locality where I have 
obtained this species was on the upper Columbia River, opposite Lake 
Chelan, Washington, in July 1879. Here quite a colony nested in a 
high perpendicular cliff on the south side of and about a mile back from 
the river, and numbers of them flew to and from the valley below where 
they were feeding. The day was a cloudy one and the slow-drizzling 
rain was falling the entire time I was there; this caused the birds to fly 
low, and they were easily identified. They evidently had young, and the 
twitterings of the latter could readily be heard as soon as a bird entered 
one of the numerous crevices in the cliff above. This was utterly inac¬ 
cessible, being fully 300 feet high and almost perpendicular; and without 
suitable ropes to lower one from above, it was both useless and impractical 
to make an attempt to reach the nests. These were evidently placed 
well back in the fissures, as nothing bearing a resemblance to one was 
visible from either above or below.” 
The writer had word of the nesting of these birds in the summer 
of 1906 upon a majestic rock-wall overlooking the Sahale Glacier in the 
Tipper Horse-shoe Basin in the Chelan country, but a visit paid to this 
scene the following season failed to discover either nests or birds, although 
local miners were ready to confirm the report of their presence in numbers 
the previous season. Dr. Edward Hasell, a reputable bird-student of 
Victoria, B. C., reported their nesting about a certain cliff overlooking 
Cowichan Lake on Vancouver Island. The cliff referred to is about 
1600 feet high (1500 feet is the Doctor’s limit, so the birds were not 
disturbed). Ridgway saw them in 1868 about a cliff on the Carson 
River in Nevada. And so it has gone for decades,—glimpses, rumors, 
tantalizing prospects, near successes, but never a view of the coveted eggs. 
Other North American Swifts, of which there are three species, 
lay from four to six moderate-sized white eggs. The Chimney Swift 
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