May, 1918 
FOREST 
A N 1) S T R E A M 
289 
THE CHIMNEY SWIFT 
NOTES ON A USEFUL BIRD AND SOME 
OF ITS CURIOUS ORIENTAL RELATIVES 
A CORRESPONDENT in Macon, Geor¬ 
gia, has written as follows about a 
conspicuous, widely distributed, and 
yet not very well known bird: 
"Will you kindly inform me as to the 
winter home of a beautiful little bird we 
have here from April to October? It is the 
§wift (we call it Chimney Sweep). Near 
my home, in August and September, about 
dusk every day, you can see hundreds of 
them dropping into a large chimney to 
roost. I have seen over two thousand of 
them circling around this chimney, and how 
they pack in there for the night is interest¬ 
ing. I suppose they winter in South 
America.” 
From almost every point of view the 
Chimney Swift is one of the most interest¬ 
ing of North American land birds. Its tech¬ 
nical name, Cheetura pelagica, means “the 
spine-tail of the sea,” which, as is often the 
case with the fixed terms of science, is not 
more than half appropriate, for the only 
sea with which the swift can be fairly asso¬ 
ciated is that of the boundless atmosphere— 
the ocean of the sky. 
The bird belongs to a family of about a 
hundred species which are distributed over 
the greater part of the world, but are most 
numerous in the tropics. The Chimney 
Swift is the only representative of this 
family that has penetrated into eastern 
North America, where it breeds all the way 
from the Gulf coast to Quebec and New¬ 
foundland. Its winter home is not in the 
South American continent, as our corre¬ 
spondent supposes, but in Mexico and Cen¬ 
tral America. Its northward and southward 
range is therefore rather limited when 
compared with those of many birds having 
much inferior powers of flight, but which 
migrate perhaps from Alaska to the equator 
or beyond. 
The swifts are related to the humming¬ 
birds and the Whip-poor-will, and are not 
at all close cousins of the swallows with 
which they are popularly associated. Their 
resemblance to the swallows is purely su¬ 
perficial, and is not borne out by a study 
of the internal anatomy. The similarity is 
an excellent example, however, of what is 
called “parallelism” or “convergence” in na¬ 
ture, which means merely that similar hab¬ 
its as regards flight, aerial feeding, nesting, 
etc., have resulted in the evolution, from 
diverse ancestry, of birds having many of 
the same bodily characteristics. In other 
words, the resemblance is adaptive; nature 
is so precise, perhaps as the result of un¬ 
told millions of experiments, that one basic 
type of mouth, wing, tail, and hind limb 
best suits the way of life of both swift and 
swallow, and has been acquired by each 
independently. All of this is in the lan¬ 
guage of evolution, but the facts corre¬ 
spond, in a sense, to the independent inven- 
ion of the bow and arrow, or canoe, or 
>honetic alphabet, by widely separated races 
>f primitive men. 
The Chimney Swift is an excellent exam- 
>le of a bird that has definitely benefited 
hrough the settlement of this continent by 
eople who construct permanent habitations. 
Before the white men came these birds 
made their nests within the hollow hearts 
of great dead forest trees, and it is almost 
certain that a tremendous increase in their 
numbers must have taken place during 
the three centuries in which the supply of 
brick or stone chimneys has been constantly 
growing. Audubon tells of a certain plane 
tree in the forests of Kentucky in which 
he counted over nine thousand of these 
swifts, clinging to the inside of the hollow 
trunk! But a spectacle like this may never 
be seen again, for the swifts have adopted 
the man-made chimney as their preferred 
nesting environment, and they find an. 
abundance of such sites, notwithstanding 
the fact that many good New Englanders 
put wire netting over their chimney-tops 
from the notion that swifts bring bed-bugs 
into the house. The parasites of the birds 
are not, as a matter of fact, the unwelcome 
pests that they are supposed to be, but are 
a species of Mallophaga, or feather-eating 
louse, which does not infest the person or 
property of human beings, and which dies, 
indeed, soon after removal from its normal 
air, for its puny feet are useless for perch- 
# host, the swift. 
The Chimney Swift all but lives in the 
ing, and can support the bird only when 
it clings with its claws to some rough, ver¬ 
tical surface and props itself up with the 
sharp spines on the ends of its tail feath¬ 
ers. Its flight is speedy, agile, and impres¬ 
sively efficient, though less graceful than 
the swallow’s. It is said, on whose author¬ 
ity I do not know, to cover a thousand 
miles during a day’s flight, which sometimes 
includes the period before dawn, and the 
evening twilight, as well as the hours of 
sunshine. Its food, captured entirely on the 
wing, comprises beetles, flying ants, mos¬ 
quitos, bugs, grasshoppers, and other in¬ 
sects, so that its feeding habits may be con¬ 
sidered highly beneficial from our stand¬ 
point. While hawking food for its young 
it fills up its capacious mouth and cheeks 
with insects before it returns to the nest. 
The bill of the swift is exceedingly small, 
but its mouth extends back under the eye, 
and when it is opened is about the only 
thing visible from the front. 
The nesting materials of the Chimney 
Swift are, like its prey, gathered in mid¬ 
air, for the birds skim over tall trees and 
snap off with their mouths (not with their 
feet, as has often been said) tiny dead 
twigs from the topmost branches. The 
twigs are carried to the dark interior of the 
selected chimney and are glued to the brick 
wall and to one another by sticky, gelatinous 
saliva which comes from glands in the 
bird’s mouth. A substantial, semi-circular 
basket is thus formed for the four white 
eggs, and, barring a long period of heavy 
rain, or an unfortunate use of the open 
fireplace below, the' young swiftlets hatch 
and thrive until they literally overflow their 
hanging cradle, after which they may be 
found clinging solemnly and patiently to 
the sooty walls, “sitting on their tails.” 
Many such have I watched in my boyhood 
inside the tower of an old Long Island 
wooden windmill. 
Some of the Oriental relatives of the 
Chimney Swift have dispensed altogether 
with twigs in the construction of their 
nests, and weave them with saliva alone, 
the latter substance hardening in the air 
precisely like the silk of a spider or cater¬ 
pillar. These are the famous “soup nests” 
of Chinese epicures. The newly-made gela¬ 
tin baskets are scraped from the walls of 
the caves in which they are built, and after 
a process of refining the nest substance is 
served up as soup at the expensive and 
delectable banquets of the mandarins! 
So quickly do the Chimney Swifts vanish 
in autumn and reappear in the spring, that 
the extraordinary idea that these birds sleep 
through the winter in tree-trunks, or caves, 
or even in the mud of ponds, has in the 
past had credence in many parts of the 
country. R. C. M. 
NEW ENGLAND BIRDS 
IN A HARD WINTER 
T HE severity of the winter just past 
caused much suffering to residents of 
the northern states, and had an important 
effect also on the wild things in nature. 
The severe cold which early closed up 
great bodies of water like Long Island 
Sound and Great South Bay, drove many 
birds far south of their usual winter range. 
Northern species, such as oldsquaws, black 
sea-coots and goosanders—all birds that 
are very unusual on the North Carolina 
Coast—were seen in the waters of Curri¬ 
tuck Sound. Canvasbacks have been more 
abundant in North Carolina waters than 
for many years, and are said to have 
reached Georgia. Harlequin ducks went as 
far south as South Carolina. 
An inte-resting report recently issued by 
Mr. E. H. Forbush, the eminent state 
ornithologist of Massachusetts, covers va¬ 
rious New England birds and comments on 
this remarkable southward extension of 
migration. His report is gloomy so far as 
grouse and quail are concerned. In the 
northern states the ground was covered 
with snow continuously for nearly three 
months, with a resulting scarcity of food 
for these species. In all the northern states 
these birds are greatly reduced in numbers, 
while their enemies—foxes, hawks and 
owls—are unusually abundant. Rabbits, 
which constitute the chief food of some of 
our larger hawks and owls, are exceeding¬ 
ly scarce in the north, and there has been 
a migration southward of goshawks and 
the larger owls, which here prey largely on 
non-migratory game birds. The outlook 
for upland shooting next fall seems dis¬ 
couraging. 
The goshawk has been more numerous 
in many localities than last year. Late in 
November it was reported as coming south 
through Canadian provinces from the 
north, where a great dearth of rabbits 
prevailed. Upwards of 6o specimens have 
been reported as taken in Massachusetts, 
and one taxidermist in Rhode Island had 
more than 50 goshawks brought in. Many 
have been seen from Cape Cod to the 
Berkshire hills. Sparrow hawks were 
noted in eastern localities in Massachusetts, 
Rhode Island and Connecticut throughout 
December, and a few sharp-shinned and 
rough-legged hawks were reported. 
