Last week Stan Strong of Canton stopped at our home to give me a dead chimney swift, which was in a mummified state. Strong told me that he found the bird lying on his cellar floor. He thought the bird had flown down the chimney and was unable to fly out.

Since the bird was in a zip lock freezer bag, I decided to put it in our freezer until I could get in touch with our local game warden.

I was heading down the cellar steps when I had a flashback to a day many years ago. Mary Alice was getting something from the freezer and left out a very loud scream. After the scream, I heard my wife yell, “Bill, what is wrapped up here in the freezer?”

Although I had previously promised not to store wildlife treasures in the freezer, I thought I could get away with it. I had double wrapped the flying squirrel in plastic and placed it inside a brown paper bag, hoping I had disguised the contents and then hid the package in the back of the bottom shelf.

The chimney swift is one of our late migrators. In checking past diaries I found that I wrote on Sunday May 3, 1998: “I saw chimney swifts for the first time this spring.” The earliest date that I previously noticed the swifts was on May 4 and the latest date was May 15, which occurred in 1995.

The chimney swifts migrate north in loose flocks, usually arriving in Pennsylvania during April and in Troy, by the beginning of May. While migrating, the flock roosts in large chimneys or air-shafts. A flock will gather by a chimney at sunset, sometimes circling for nearly an hour until the bird closest to the opening drops into the chimney, with the remainder of the flock following in a thin stream.

The sex of the male and female chimney swifts is outwardly alike. They have a 12- to 12 3/4-inch wingspread, which is quite large for a bird that is only 4 1/2- to 5 1/2-inches long. The swift’s wing beat seems hurried and bat-like, and it has been said that they appear as a flying cigar. When watching the chimney swifts fly in the spring, you will notice that they often fly in threes.

This combination is usually two males chasing a female. In flight, they are always uttering sharp chippering notes. They feed while in flight. I have noticed that these flights are often quite high, while at other times they are much closer to the ground, depending on where the insect activity is occurring.

While the bird is hunting, insects are collected at the back of the throat, in a special food pouch, and bound together with saliva into a ball known as a bolus. These food balls, which could contain hundreds of insects, are periodically eaten or taken to the nest.

The chimney swift is quite appropriately named because it is entirely a sooty gray color. However, the coloring does not come from the chimney, which is its favorite roosting area. The nest, which is built of sticks held together by the bird’s saliva, can be found from two feet to twenty-two feet down inside the chimney. Death can come to the young swifts if fires are built or furnaces turned on in late spring or early summer to ward off the chills.

Today, the deterioration of brick chimneys, the increase of using chimney caps and newer homes not needing chimneys are all limiting nesting sites. The use of pesticides and other agricultural activities could also be reducing the amount of aerial food available for swifts.

Swift is an appropriate name for this bird due to its amazing speed, which has been clocked at 15-21 miles per hour. The swift family is the most aerial of all land birds. The chimney swift’s family name is Apodidae, which is Latin and means footless because the bird’s feet are small and ineffective for land travel. If a chimney swift lands on the ground, taking off would be difficult. The genus name is Chaetura, which is Greek and means spine-tailed, referring to the spines that project from the ends of the tail feathers.

The species name is pelagica, coming from Greek and meaning of the sea. Perhaps no other eastern land-bird is as continuously airborne as the chimney swift. A swift never lands except at the nest or inside a chimney, where it will cling to the vertical walls, while roosting.

Since the swift never lands anywhere except at the nest, imagine how far the bird must fly in a day’s time. During its lifetime of nine years, a banded chimney swift was estimated to have flown 1.35 million miles, including round trips on its migration. On wing, the chimney swift feeds, drinks, mates and even gathers nesting materials. During the night, the flock returns to the chimney, grasping the walls and actually overlapping each other as they hang for the night.

Although the swift resembles a swallow, which is a songbird, the swift is neither classified as a songbird nor a perching bird. The swift is in the same family as humming birds. Although different in appearance and action, the swifts and hummingbirds are more closely related to each other than any other birds.

In flight, swallows are often mistaken for swifts because many swallows have forked tails, and while this is also true of some swifts, most have short, stiff tails and sometimes spine-tipped. Even Linnaeus in 1758 classified the swifts as swallows.

Swifts and the swallows were around during Biblical times and confusion about these birds also occurred at that time. The Hebrew word deror, which means bird of freedom, was given to the swifts because of its swift, untiring flight. Swallows and swifts were numerous in Palestine. The swallows remained in Palestine throughout the year, while the swifts migrated.

For this reason, according to the book “Birds of the Bible” by Gene Stratton Porter, Jeremiah was referring to the swifts when he wrote “The swallows and the crane observe the time of their coming.”

Summertime and the living is easy, so one of my favorite things to do is sit on our front porch, eating ice cream and watching the swifts go down the chimney of the house across the street.

Bill Bower is a retired Pennsylvania Game Commission Wildlife Officer. Read his blog and listen to his podcasts on the outdoors at www.onemaningreen.com.