[Mnbird] Chimney Swift

[DONALD GRUSSING Owner]

Nice memories Al. As a kid in Hopkins I caught heck from the football coaches in junior high school when at practice after school I would get so distracted by the swirling tornado of swifts going down the chimney of the old senior high school next to the practice field (The school and its huge chimney is now long gone), In summer I would watch bunches of swifts flying past the dead twigs high in the elm trees trying to break off twiglets from which to make their nests.


And I spent countless summer hours watching swifts, trying to determine if they sometimes flew with alternating wing beats (a topic in some of the bird books of those days.). I hardly ever see a chimney swift now.


Don Grussing
Minnetonka





On Thu, 21 Sep, 2023 at 8:00 AM, Allen Batt via Mnbird <mnbird at lists.mnbird.net> wrote:
 

To: mnbird

 I saw a single Chimney Swift yesterday. 
 It strikes me as odd when I see only one. It’s like eating a single potato chip. “I can’t see just one,” I tell myself.
 But for the past several Breeding Bird Surveys, I’ve counted just one swift.
 The surgeon told me to think of a pleasant place before I went under the knife. I stared at a chimney in my thoughts. I’m no chimney sweep and haven’t even played one on TV, but I travel around each year, hoping for a good crop of chimney swifts. When the swifts zoom into a chimney to roost, it’s a curtain coming down on a magnificent play. I’ve seen flocks of swifts do their disappearing act in many chimneys, but the chimney I thought of was the one at Villa Maria that I visited annually for many years. Swifts may look like flying cigars, but they are memories on the wing. I remember those moments when I need them.

Al Batt
Freeborn County

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