The Swifts

Isabel and I are watching the most boring thing in the world. Crowds have gathered on the lawn of the school across the street from us. Whole families, middle class white families so 2 kids max, but also some grandparents. They are carrying blankets, lawn chairs and picnic baskets.

My first thought is "concert", which happened a couple times this summer, but no. This is the foretold coming of the Swifts. As long as I have lived in Portland and a couple weeks before, in answer to "What's so special besides beer and bicycles?", people have told me about the coming of the Swifts. Apparently, on September evenings many Swifts (a boring black bird that looks like how little kids draw birds) gather in droves and plunge head first (a guess) into the chimney of a local school. Why the school even has a chimney I don't know. But damned if it isn't occurring at the school across the street from me.

So Isabel and I join the assembled Portlanders on the hilled schoolyard and face the chimney waiting for some action. There is none, besides little kids running around and screaming and Isabel begging off people’s picnic baskets. There are Audubon representatives at a little table wearing antenna hats with foam birds on springs. They clearly speak for the Swifts. I go over to them and they hand me some literature. These are Vaux Swifts, pronounces "Vox". What are the Vaux Swifts doing here? To quote the literature, they are "communal roosting". Specifically, they are "finding safe nightly roost spots along the way (South), providing roles models for young birds avoiding predators and keeping warm. Wow! They're amazing. Totally cool!" The bolded part is also from the literature.


I see nothing amazing about this and don't even see any Swifts, although a Hawk has apparently been informed they're coming and is flying nearby read to pounce. A little girl in a family settling behind me says, "This isn't where we sit". An adult asks, "Where do we sit?" She says, "We sit where we can ride cardboard down the hill". Sure enough, she is carrying a flat open cardboard box. This sounds more exciting than the Swifts, but Isabel and I stick with our spot, largely because she in eating out of someone’s picnic basket (by invitation).

Eventually 10 or 20 Swifts (about as many as were baked in a pie) gather by the chimney, circle and go in, rather like they are going down the drain. But they have escaped the Hawk's attention (he probably got bored and is riding cardboard down the hill) and made it to safety.

This show repeats every night in September and the Swift people (Audubon Society) show me a chart of the number of birds who flew in the chimney each night last year at this time. "Who counts?” I ask.  They say, "It's approximate". Apparently we haven't reached peak Swift season yet, so Isabel and I will return another night. We will use it as an excuse to ask out a guy. It is free and that way we will never have to find out if he is the kind of guy that doesn't pay on first dates. There seems to be disproportionate numbers of those in Portland.