(Vaux’s is pronounced like foxes)
The Vaux’s Swift swirl is back again this autumn, partway through this mighty flock’s migration down from somewhere north of here to Venezuela for the summer. These small cigar-sized birds, breathtaking acrobats of air who eat, drink, court, and mate mid-flight — with prodigious appetite for airborne ants and termites — must finally find a place to roost each night, not prone to perching during their busy, darting days. At one time when the West was rich with forests stretching to the rain-soaked sky, the gregarious swifts would find their nightly beds in hollow trees, where with their Velcro’d feet stuck to the snagsides, they’d cram together in the thousands. But with the loss of old growth, these birds turned urbanite, and learned that city chimneys could suffice. And here they’ve found their Ritz, a towering old brick smokestack, unused now at Chapman School, where they can check in every night, gathering at dusk in vast, dark sheets of swoopy, curling, looping birds that finally form themselves into a tapering spiral funneling toward the chimney mouth, an avian choreography of narrowing gyre, accelerating down until the swifts start dropping one by one by one by one into the old school’s smokestack, a communal crash pad after this flashmob-of-the-sky performance, a fine warm site to nestle in, fluff up, and coo about the day’s grand circling spectacle, the swirl and whirr of their community. A swarm now one, they’re snug together dreaming of the next day’s dance.
BWNA board member Tim Gillespie was a public school teacher in the Portland area for almost four decades. A poet and essayist, he has lived with his family in Beaumont-Wilshire since 1979.