It's chimney swift season at the Wildlife Center of Virginia

It’s early August, and at the Wildlife Center of Virginia you might say it’s chimney swift season. As homeowners take advantage of warm weather to clean their chimneys, dozens of baby birds fall or are removed from nests and brought in for care.

Chimney swifts have feet that are perfect for perching or building nests on vertical surfaces like rock crevices or hollow trees, so when humans began building homes with chimneys, swifts made the switch — according to Connor Gillespie at the Wildlife Center of Virginia.

“They find different sticks that they like,” Gillespie says. “They’ll bring them into that chimney and secrete a glue-like substance from under the tongue and adhere those sticks to the side of a chimney.”

There they create colonies.

“Huge colonies, beautiful colonies, very loud colonies,” says Alejandra Olvera, a rehabilitation supervisor at the center.

“They’re kind of like the last baby birds we see in our season. They start fletching out of chimneys because people are cleaning their chimney or attics – doing renovations over the summer and they find all [these] babies.”

At first, employees feed the birds a nutritious mix of high protein kitten chow, vitamins and minerals. Later they get tiny worms or crickets, and when they’re ready, staffer Mac Stewart says they’re freed in areas near other chimney swift colonies.

“Once they show us that they’re able to fly around their enclosure, they’re eating on their own on the wing, their feathers are in good condition and waterproof, we can release them,” Stewart says. “And they’ll do just fine.”

This work is especially important because – in the age of central heating – fewer homes and businesses have chimneys, so swift populations are in decline.