What the Flock Is in My Chimney?

October 11, 2021·25 min·2 clips

Up to three thousand chimney swifts pile into one chimney and lay their wings over each other like a living quilt.

The episode opens with guest host Jorge Just answering a helpline voicemail from Tara in Huntingburg, Indiana. Tara and her boyfriend Brian have been arguing over a bird that pours down his chimney at dusk and leaves at dawn. She describes the whirlpool of birds around the chimney top from their back party garage and the boyfriend's claim that there are a thousand birds in there. Just calls in Connecticut State Ornithologist Dr. Margaret Rubega, who identifies the birds as chimney swifts. Rubega explains the birds historically roosted in hollow dead trees and were forced into chimneys only after European colonists felled the big trees. She describes how swifts flip head-up at the last moment and helicopter tail-first into the chimney, and how they can be identified in flight by a flying-cigar body shape pointy at both ends. She also notes their oversized softball-equivalent eyes, catcher-mitt mouths, and grappling-hook feet that only cling to vertical surfaces, making them notoriously hard to study. The episode pivots to Althea Sherman, an Iowa artist born in the 1850s who trained as an art teacher and became an ornithologist at age 50. Sherman broke into a male-dominated field that studied birds by shooting them, refusing to kill the birds she watched. She built a 28-foot, nine-foot-diameter fake chimney tower with four floors, peepholes, and an interior window where she could stick her head in for a 360-degree view. Sherman studied swifts there for 18 years and produced more than 400 pages of notes. Tara reads a June 2, 1927 journal entry in which Sherman describes a swift placing a stick on a nest and working its bill like putty. Rubega reveals the wet shiny fluid is saliva: chimney swifts glue their nests to the wall with their own spit. She explains that once a pair nests in a chimney, they chase out all other swifts and claim it as private. On Tara's headline question, Rubega concedes the boyfriend may be right: a single chimney can hold up to 3,000 roosting swifts. She describes the roosting ritual, where each arriving bird picks a spot next to the last, drapes a wing over its neighbor, and slowly edges together until the chimney is an unbroken wall of feathers sharing body heat. The show closes with helpline signoff details, a joke about Indiana's state snack being popcorn and state beverage being water, and the usual credits.

As heard by us

A backyard chimney mystery becomes a bird story with Althea Sherman at its center.

Jorge Just keeps the tone loose and comic as a backyard mystery in Southern Indiana turns into a bird story with a clean final turn. The answer lands on chimney swifts, then on Althea Sherman, the Iowa ornithologist who built a fake chimney so she could watch birds without…

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