Fake chimneys provide homes for vulnerable birds

BIRMINGHAM, Ala. — People from New England to Texas are building fake chimneys as nesting spots and migration motels for chimney swifts, little birds that are dwindling in number as the nation’s architectural landscape changes.

Old factories and schools with huge chimneys are being torn down, and most new houses don’t have chimneys. Many homeowners who do have chimneys are getting them lined with metal for fire safety or capping them to keep animals out.

So conservationists are building big chimney-like birdhouses as summer homes for swifts, which can rest only by using their toes as grappling hooks on a rough, vertical surface. Several are located around Birmingham, Ala., where Greg Harber has been watching the birds for a decade as chimneys vanish.

It’s disheartening to see how many chimneys have been lost, “but it does give us hope that if we put them up that they will use them,” Harber said as swifts swirled near a real chimney. Because the 5.5-inch-long, torpedo-shaped gray-brown birds sometimes called “flying cigars “ spend most of their time flying at up to 35 mph, such migration gatherings offer some of the best chances to see them.

Though there are still an estimated 7.7 million adult chimney swifts, scientists estimate their totals have fallen by more than 70% since the 1960s, and by more than one-third just over three recent generations of the bird — about 16 years. That steep decline prompted the International Union for the Conservation of Nature to reclassify the species last year as vulnerable — the step before endangered.

“It fits right in with a lot of other data,” including a recent report that North America has lost about one-quarter of its birds since 1970, said Jim Bonner, director of the Audubon Society of Western Pennsylvania.

It’s unclear how much of the chimney...