(_ChA|tura pelagica_) Swift family
_Called also:_ CHIMNEY SWALLOW; AMERICAN SWIFT
(Illustration facing p. 66)
_Length_--5 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.