Length -- to 5.45 inches. About an inch shorter than the English
sparrow. Long wings make its length appear greater.
Male and Female -- Deep sooty gray; throat of a trifle lighter
gray. Wings extend an inch and a half beyond the even tail,
which has sharply pointed and very elastic quills, that serve
as props. Feet are muscular, and have exceedingly sharp claws.
Range -- Peculiar to North America east of the Rockies, and from
Labrador to Panama.
Migrations -- April. September or October. Common summer
resident.
The chimney swift is, properly speaking, not a swallow at all, though chimney
swallow is its more popular name. Rowing towards the roof of your house, as if
it used first one wing, then the other, its flight, while swift and powerful,
is stiff and mechanical, unlike the swallow's, and its entire aspect suggests
a bat. The nighthawk and whippoorwill are its relatives, and it resembles them
not a little, especially in its nocturnal habits.
So much fault has been found with the misleading names of many birds, it is
pleasant to record the fact that the name of the chimney swift is everything
it ought to be. No other birds can surpass and few can equal it in its
powerful flight, sometimes covering a thousand miles in twenty-four hours, it
is said, and never resting except in its roosting places (hollow trees or
chimneys of dwellings), where it does not perch, but rather clings to the
sides with its sharp claws, partly supported by its sharper tail. Audubon
tells of a certain plane tree in Kentucky where he counted over nine thousand
of these swifts clinging to the hollow trunk.
Their nest, which is a loosely woven twig lattice, made of twigs of trees,
which the birds snap off with their beaks and carry in their beaks, is glued
with the bird's saliva or tree-gum into a solid structure, and firmly attached
to the inside of chimneys, or hollow trees where there are no houses about.
Two broods in a season usually emerge from the pure white, elongated eggs.
What a twittering there is in the chimney that the swifts appropriate after
the winter fires have died out! Instead of the hospitable column of smoke
curling from the top, a cloud of sooty birds wheels and floats above it. A
sound as of distant thunder fills the chimney as a host of these birds,
startled, perhaps, by some indoor noise, whirl their way upward. Woe betide
the happy colony if a sudden cold snap in early summer necessitates the
starting of a fire on the hearth by the unsuspecting householder! The glue
being melted by the fire, "down comes the cradle, babies and all" into the
glowing embers. A prolonged, heavy rain also causes their nests to loosen
their hold and fall with the soot to the bottom.
Thrifty New England housekeepers claim that bedbugs, commonly found on bats,
infest the bodies of swifts also, which is one reason why wire netting is
stretched across the chimney tops before the birds arrive from the South.