Private Viewing

Sometimes I feel as if I’m the only one around paying attention. I was walking around dusk in Old Town Alexandria a couple of weeks ago, when my attention was drawn by a chittering overhead. The sound came from a flock of chimney swifts wheeling around the unused smoke stack at the old Courthouse Building on Washington Street. Having raised their babies, and prior to migration for the rain forests of the upper Amazon, swifts spend the rest of the summer feeding on the wing and forming communal roosts in (guess where) chimneys. Before the European invasion of the Americas, chimney swifts roosted in standing hollow trees, but chimneys are even better and it is rare to find them in hollow trees anymore. The wheel in the sky grew as more swifts joined and the sound level intensified. I like to think they were swapping stories of where the best spots are for the tastiest bugs and about the one that got away.

Roger Tory Peterson in his Field Guide to Birds East of the Rockies, describes swifts as "a cigar with wings". Swifts are related to hummingbirds and move their wings almost as fast. Rather than the blur you see with hummers, swifts seem to flap their wings alternately; it's just an optical illusion from the rapidity of movement; your brain interprets it as alternate movements. Swifts have tiny feet; early biologist who should have known better, thought the feet were missing altogether, leading to the group name Apodidae (no feet). Their small feet and weak toes leave swifts unable to perch on a horizontal surface as do other birds. Chimney swifts prefer to find a rough vertical surface and hook their claws into some irregularity and roost like upside down bats.

The wheel reached out to half a block in size, and it seemed as if every swift in Alexandria was circling the chimney and chattering up a storm. At some point, known only to the birds, critical mass was reached and the entire mass spiraled down the chimney like smoke going backwards. It was like some sort of magic trick, which I guess that’s really what it was. From the first circling birds to empty sky, the whole show was over in less than five minutes. The truly amazing thing was that, as I stood there, agog in astonishment at being privileged to see such a spectacle, nobody else along that busy street even bothered to look up. I mumbled a thanks for the show to Whoever might be listening, and rejoined the throng, hurrying towards my destination of the evening.