The Children's Book of Birds

by Olive Thorne Miller

(Micropodidæ)[21]

Swifts are curious birds, with strange habits. The one we know by sight in the East is the chimney swift. Most like him in the West is Vaux's swift. His ways are like the common chimney swift's, and his looks nearly the same.

The Chimney Swift is often called the chimney swallow, but it is very easy to tell one from a swallow. One way is, that when a swift is flying about over our heads, he looks as if he had no tail. The tail is very short, not half so long as the wing. He looks more like a bat than a bird.

Then the swift flies in a different way. A swallow soars a good deal, that is, moves without beating the wings, a sort of gliding through the air. But a swift beats the wings much more frequently. A swallow will often alight on a telegraph-wire or a roof. A swift is said never to alight except to sleep.

This bird is so much at home on wing that he even gets the twigs to make the nest while flying. These twigs are the smallest ones on the ends of dead branches, and are easily snapped off. The bird flies at them, snatches one in beak or feet, breaks it off, and goes right on, without stopping.

When he gets his twig, he carries it to a dark, sooty chimney. A queer place for a home, surely. They used to choose a hollow tree or a cave to live in, and that seems much nicer. But chimneys are now more plentiful than hollow trees. And besides, they are nearer the bird's food. So chimney homes are now the fashion in the swift family.

To make a swift nest, the twigs are glued to the chimney in the shape of a little bracket. The glue is the saliva of the bird, which is gummy, and gets hard as it dries, and looks like isinglass.

The mouth of a chimney swift is very odd. You have heard of "stretching a mouth from ear to ear." That's just what the swift does every time he opens his. It needs to be big, for he gathers up his food in it. While he is flying around in the air, he is busy catching tiny flying creatures, such as flies and beetles, and thus keeping the air clear for us.

The tail of this bird is another queer thing. It has no soft feathery tips like most birds' tails. It ends in sharp spines, like needles. These are most useful to brace him against the rough chimney where he sleeps. These spines are really the stiff shafts or stems of the feathers, sticking out beyond the plumey part.