Chimney Swift

About the Chimney Swift

The Chimney Swift is the "flying cigar" -- a stub of a bird with long scythe wings that spends essentially its entire day airborne, chittering over Texas towns from spring arrival to fall departure. Swifts eat, drink, bathe, court, and even gather nest twigs on the wing; when they finally stop, they cannot perch like songbirds at all, only cling to vertical surfaces with tiny hooked feet.

They once roosted and nested in hollow trees; today they are almost wholly tied to masonry chimneys, which is both the species' lifeline and its problem. As old chimneys get capped and torn down, swift numbers have fallen steeply, and the IUCN now lists the species as Vulnerable. The late-summer spectacle of hundreds funneling into a school chimney at dusk is worth protecting.

Photographing one is among the hardest routine challenges in bird photography -- a small, dark, erratic target that never, ever stops. These frames were taken over the Austin area in May 2023, panning with birds hawking insects low ahead of a storm line.

The honest advice: pick a flight lane, pre-focus, shoot bursts, and accept a low keeper rate. Every sharp Chimney Swift photo represents a hundred deleted ones.