Something Swift

Chaetura pelagic—the genus and species of birds my family became intimately acquainted with this past week. They dropped in for a visit, in fact—three of them—all babies—through the chimney.

Their sound was so alien and shrill I immediately labeled it “Jurassic”—like the sound of a baby raptor in Spielberg’s movie Jurassic Park. My wife, Donna, had thought the crash that brought the nest down had sprung a gas leak in our fireplace insert. Then, buried in the soot, she discovered baby birds, busy vocalizing a cross between a yipper of hunger and a panicked hissing that inspires the fear of God.

What do you do when tiny chimney swifts drop into your living room? From time to time, in our old house, swallows will fly through the chimney and I’ll chase them down, cover them with a blanket, then release them out-of-doors. These swifts, though, were only nestlings. I carry memories from childhood of scooping up a fallen hatchling or nestling and placing it gingerly in a box lined with grass to die. I recall it seemed cruel, but no good alternative ever came along

By the time I’d come on this scene, Donna and the kids had already managed the grass part, but they hadn’t stopped there. Our eldest daughter was busy on the Internet researching options, not for their peaceful death, but their possible life. This took Donna down a long telephone trail leading to an English couple who operate For the Birds of Indiana, thirty miles north of us. They have rescued and released back into the wild or appropriate habitats literally thousands of birds comprising hundreds of native and exotic species. Their solution? Put the birds back up the chimney, where their parents would find them and feed them.

Donna pointed out that our terracotta chimney pots sit on a pitched roof, forty feet off the ground. There was no way to either deposit the nestlings onto the roof or safely hoist them up through the chimney below. But when Donna wondered aloud about the ‘leaving them in the grass-lined box to die’ scenario of my childhood, the lovely English couple nearly apoplexed.

As far as I know, it is the first time she has been accused of cold-blooded murder.

“Well why not leave the box out on the porch ledge?” I suggested. “Maybe the parents will find them there and feed them. And with cries like theirs, Mom and Dad would have to be deaf or indifferent not to!” But this raised the question of cats and coons and who knows what, out for an evening snack.

Well, it is a cat-eat-bird world, I was thinking—but just then the lovely couple offered to meet us halfway and take over the care of these orphaned swifts. After all, as the lady informed us, in all of Indiana only she and one other bird handler from Rochester are capable of nurturing nestlings.

I was thinking on the drive up to our meeting place how much I’d rather be writing an article for this site than on this ornithological errand. But then we met our bird-lovers and I realized that this story was my article. As the husband of the couple gingerly transferred the three small birds from our shoebox to a glass carrier, they immediately wrapped their talons around his fingers as if they were home. He informed us of their special ability to attach to surfaces like chimneys, where they fledge by flapping their wings in order to grow strong for flight. We learned that chimney swifts once roosted and nested in hollows of trees in the forests that filled the Midwest before early pioneers cleared them. How these adaptive creatures took instead to abandoned buildings, stone wells, and, yes, chimneys, in the summer months. How they wintered in parts of Amazonian Peru, but always managed to return each summer. And how they were now endangered, because old chimneys of brick and stone—chimneys like ours—were increasingly a thing of the past.

By the time he was finished, he didn’t need to say it, but I’ll share it here anyway:

“How very fortunate you are to have come into contact with these endangered wonders, these miracle chimney swifts. This is a rare treat!”

And I remembered the words of the ancient mystic theologian Meister Eckhart:

Every creature is full of God and a book about God—

including, it turns out, those living in our chimney.

So if you hear something Jurassic hissing in your chimney, don’t panic!

You might, however, consider giving For the Birds of Indiana a call.