Note: All visuals by Evan Benally Atwood. Story and voiceover by B. ‘Toastie’ Oaster.
It’s mid-September, when Portland transitions from cutoff T-shirt season to cozy hoodie weather. The nights are getting cooler, and the school year’s hitting its rhythm. And at one school in particular, crowds gather on the grassy hillside overlooking the soccer field. Thousands of people, every night, all September long.
Portlanders bring friends from out of town. Families return year after year, because every year, thousands of Vaux swifts roost in a decommissioned chimney that towers over the Chapman Elementary soccer field in Northwest Portland. At its peak, the funnel of birds over the chimney looks like a tornado touching down.
While most arrive from Seattle or Vancouver, British Columbia, some of the birds are from as far north as Juneau. After Portland, they’ll fly to a brick factory in San Rafael, California, which also has tall chimneys. Eventually, they make their way down to Mexico City, though some continue on to Guatemala, Costa Rica — even as far south as Panama. For a single swift to cover that whole distance, it would have to fly over 4,000 miles.
This stop on the swifts’ migration draws so many people that parking gets jammed up throughout the whole neighborhood, and the city encourages people to use public transit to get there. It’s a wholesome spectacle: Couples picnic on the grass, kids slide down the hillside on makeshift cardboard sleds. Volunteers from the Bird Alliance of Oregon set up a table to educate the public and count the swifts entering the chimney. Normally, by the second or third week of September, it’s peak swift activity. But this year, the birds left their audience hanging: There were only about 13 swifts instead of 13,000. An airliner taking off from PDX glinted rose-gold in the sunset, and a full moon slowly peeked over the rooflines, but otherwise the sky was mostly empty. Murmurs of discontent and confusion carried on the early autumn breeze. Where were the beloved swifts?
Volunteers from the Bird Alliance said the school chimney is only one of a handful of places around town where the swifts roost, meaning they’re probably just sleeping somewhere else. So, where else? I asked. Where can we see them? They got tight-lipped and shifted awkwardly. They’re not supposed to say, one volunteer told me; those neighborhoods don’t want the crowds.
It’s not clear why the swifts changed their behavior. Could be they’re avoiding a pesky Cooper’s hawk that likes to snack on them. Or maybe there’s something inside the old chimney that’s deterring them. Or who knows … maybe it’s just the end of the swifties’ Chapman Chimney Era, and they’ve taken the tour elsewhere. But for the Portlanders and out-of-towners who came to celebrate the treasured local phenomenon, it turned out to be an unusual anticlimax.
