Celebrate World Swift Day today!
Today is World Swift Day, a global celebration of all species of Swifts. Becoming an official ‘day’ in 2019 it was first introduced by Swifts Without Frontiers to bring awareness to this amazing bird. World Swift Day is celebrated across all continents and in over forty countries, raising awareness about this fascinating group of species and rallying support for their conservation!
Chimney Swifts are small birds with a gray-brown cigar-shaped body. They have crescent-shaped wings and fly fast and erratically. Most of the day you can spot them flying over urban, rural and forested areas, capturing flying insects, in fact they are excellent at providing insect control service!
Here are a few interesting facts about Chimney Swifts:
- Swifts belong to the family Apodidae, a Greek word meaning “without feet.” While they do have feet, they are very small, and primarily used for occasionally perching or clinging to vertical surfaces like the inside of a chimney.
- Swifts love to winter in the Amazon Basin of Peru.
- Chimney Swifts are protected by the Migratory Bird Treaty Act of 1916. It is forbidden to remove nests, eggs, or birds from chimneys.
Here at Owl Creek Conservancy, we are helping to raise awareness about Chimney Swift conservation.
How can you help?
We have started a Chimney Swift Tower Fund and have built a tower for our local Swifts to use, but we need your help. Each tower costs around $600 to build and we can’t build more without your support! Please consider donating to our fund (you can find the donate button at the top of our website) and if you’d like to witness these amazing birds in flight you can join us at our event ‘Flight of the Chimney Swifts’ on Saturday, August 24. Full details can be found under the Events tab on our website.