The Vaux's Swifts are back this year at the Courtenay Museum

by Keith and Heather Nicol

On Wednesday, May 18 we headed down to a parking lot behind the Courtenay Museum to see if the Vaux’s Swifts that are in the area might fly down the chimney to roost for the evening. Evidently they have been seen coming to this chimney for the last few years in late April and early May and one person we spoke to said they had been here for while this year. The Vaux’s Swifts spend the winter in Mexico and breed in large hollow trees found in old growth forests in BC, Washington and Oregon. Because of this their numbers are in decline as logging removes their breeding habitat. 

 The birds feed on insects and their shape has been described as cigars with wings.  On Wednesday we were joined by my brother Bruce and his wife Mary Ellen who had just arrived from Victoria and were keen to check this birding event out. We arrived just before 8:00 pm armed with binoculars and a camera with a telephoto lens.  The birds arrival to the chimney seems to depend on the weather and so you don’t know when they might arrive but it usually anywhere from 7:30 pm
to sunset. No sooner did we get there and we saw began to see a swarm of Vaux’s Swifts swoop over head and fly over the chimney. They then disappeared for a few minutes only to return again for another fly over. Then they began to spiral around and just like Santa they headed down the chimney. Presumably they like the rough interior of the chimney and spend the night huddled together along the edges of the chimney. 

 

No sooner had this group headed down that another swarm of 40-50 birds did their fly by and after disappearing they reappeared and like the first group dropped down into the chimney.  Over the evening we saw hundreds of birds fly down the chimney but they came spread out in groups of 30 to 50. We were told by one person that 2 nights ago 2000 birds flew into the chimney in basically one large continuous pack!!.  Here is a video taken in 2021which shows the large number of birds which can descend into the chimney in short order.  So if you haven’t seen this bird phenomenon check it since who knows how long it will last this year.