Announcing Dates For MCSI Monitoring in 2019!
We are now almost two months from the long-awaited arrival of our favourite chimney dwellers (Santa inclusive). There has been much happening behind the scenes with MCSI. Most importantly ahead of May, we wanted to make sure everyone has some important dates in their diaries for the coming season.
National Roost Monitoring Program
MCSI will once again be participating in this monitoring program with other provinces in Canada. There will be four nights, and monitoring begins one hour ahead of sundown, and ends 30 minutes after sundown. We will, in the coming weeks, produce a priority list of sites to cover, mainly to make sure all the larger roosts are counted each night. The dates selected for 2019 are:
- May 22
- May 26
- May 30
- June 3
MCSI Additional Roost Monitoring
As with previous years, we encourage everyone to start monitoring their chimney whenever they can. We have added two more official nights. The first is a bit unusual in that there is a choice of options. May 18 would be our first option. However, this is the Saturday of the long weekend, and people like to go away! So, if you are unable to monitor on May 18, but would still like to participate, we are encouraging you to go out on May 16 or 17.
The final MCSI extra night is four days after the NRMP on June 7. We will also do a final public roost gathering on June 11. This is usually at Assiniboine School, but we may do something different in 2019. Watch this space!
Wednesday Night is Swift Night!
Following the official roost nights, we had great success and support in 2018 from volunteers, mainly on the Wednesday night monitoring. We will continue this in 2019!
More Places to Find Swifts
In 2018, we found swifts in 7 new places in Manitoba. We need to follow up on some of these, as we found swifts but either only have one record of a swift entering a chimney, or in some cases, we have still to find an active nest or roost site. These places are:
- Baldur
- Birtle
- Dominion City (we had one confirmed site, but a spare pair of swifts in 2018)
- Emerson
- Eriksdale
- Neepawa
- Pilot Mound
We also have found swifts in a number of other places over the years, but we are looking information on whether there are swifts now. These places include:
- Manitou
- Powerview-Pine Falls
- St Anne
Finally, we have some strong possibilities, some visited in 2018 but with no swift sightings, but which we would like to follow-up, and some which were suggested by the original computer modelling which gave us some of the other places. These include:
- Vita
- Crystal City
- Dunrea
- Ninette
- Killarney
- Virden
- Gilbert Plains
- McCreary
- Swan River
- Gladstone
- Benito
This is just some thoughts of places to look, and we will be coming back to this asking whether there are volunteers willing to spend time watching for swifts. However, if you have other suggestions, we are all ears, and open to ideas!
Where are the swifts?
Lastly, a question came to us just two days ago about the latest swift comings and goings on eBird. The current year map is reproduced below for Chimney Swifts. As you can see, there was a record from Florida, this being of three birds on February 20th. This looks as though it was a very early record and while we are not disputing this, it probably does not reflect the current state of migrating swifts. More pertinently, is the record of 30 birds on March 4th, recorded at the Panama Rainforest Discovery Centre. From what we know of winter range, this suggests we have some larger groups of swifts on the move! A second record of 121 swifts was recorded on February 21 in Panama (the red flag below the highlighted one).
Following a quiet winter, expect updates to begin mapping up in the coming weeks. The swift return cannot come soon enough!
–Tim Poole
