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Chimney-side Monitoring Is A-Go

As many of you have no doubt heard, the Manitoba Government has further loosened restrictions for indoor and outdoor gatherings, businesses, etc. Upon hearing this news, the Manitoba Chimney Swift Initiative has decided to bring back the Chimney-side Monitoring program. Volunteers can now either monitor local chimneys as per the normal protocol (with social distancing guidelines still being followed) or continue to do the Stay-at-home Monitoring protocol.

Monitoring will continue to take place on each Wednesday until June 24^th, with rain dates for the directly following Thursdays if needed. Please see the monitoring protocol and reporting forms on the Resources and Links page on the MCSI website.

If you decide to go out for chimney-side monitoring we ask that you follow the ABCD’s of Chimney Swift monitoring in the time of COVID-19:

Abide by current Covid-19 Public Health directives.

Be aware of how your presence may impact other people. Do your best to stay off sidewalks to allow for physical distancing and respect the privacy of residents who may be isolating.

Choose the best monitoring approach to engage Chimney Swifts in 2020. Keep your personal safety, and the safety of those around you, at the forefront.

Drive with due diligence. Travel prudently and try to stay in your neighbourhood, if possible.

Please also continue to monitor in household groups, or groups of two or less people. If you plan on monitoring a popular site (such as Assiniboine School) please send a quick email to mbchimneyswift@gmail.com so that we can keep track of how many people will be watching on a particular day.

A big thank you for all of our volunteers taking this evolving situation in stride. This has been a challenging year so far and we are grateful for the help and support of our volunteers!

• MCSI Steering Committee

Amanda saw her first Chimney Swift entries, as our new MCSI Coordinator, last night (May 19)! Amanda describes her wonderful winged experience –
“I went to check out Enderton Park this evening after Tim seeing the Chimney Swifts nearby. Heard them almost immediately and tracked them to the northwest side of the park. Sat and watched them circling around for about 40 minutes. Maximum of 5 swifts, but mostly 2. Saw two go down the chimney at XX Avonhurst at 9:09pm. My first swifts down a chimney as MCSI coordinator! And I think its a new site, as well!”

Indeed, the bonus round was the identification of the first new site of 2020! What a great start to backyard, + slightly beyond, birding.

Tonight is the night our new stay-at-home program launches, so be sure to be on the lookout for Chimney Swifts and other aerial insectivores. Links to the new protocol and datasheets can be found at: https://www.mbchimneyswift.com/?page_id=2216  Reports of swifts have been received from St Adolphe, Winnipeg – River Heights, Osborne Village, South Osborne, Royalwood etc., Selkirk, and Dauphin.

To cap off a great start to her work with MCSI, Amanda presented St Francois Xavier Roman Catholic Church with a Swift Champion plaque. The parishioners were acknowledged for their significant efforts in protecting the Church chimney as important swift habitat (see below).

“Keeping a home for the birds
St. Francois Xavier Roman Catholic Church (1049 Hwy. 26) is a place of worship, but also home to a threatened bird species.

On May 8, St. Francois Xavier Parish was honoured to accept a Swift Champion award from the Manitoba Chimney Swift Initiative to recognize its work to conserve a chimney swift roosting and nesting location.

This spring, the church chimney was repaired with assistance from a federal government grant approved in 2019. Church members wanted the chimney work to be completed quickly to allow the swifts to continue to use the chimney as a nesting site. A site is usually selected in early June after the birds return in late May from overwintering in the upper Amazon basin in South America.

Listed as a threatened species in Canada, chimney swifts select the interior of brick chimneys for nests.

The SFX Parish signed a 10-year agreement in 2019 to protect its church’s chimney for swift habitat. Chimney swifts were first spotted at the church in 2017 by MCSI monitors, and between two and five birds have been sighted in the subsequent summers. — Staff (courtesy Winnipeg Free Press website)”

Keep your eyes to the skies! We hope to hear of your sightings tonight.

— Barb Stewart

MCSI Stay-at-Home Chimney Swift Monitoring for Summer 2020

It’s time everyone! The first two Chimney Swifts of the spring were seen by Lynnea Parker last night flying over Shorehill Drive in Winnipeg. This means it is about time we start our monitoring for 2020!

Due to COVID-19 impacting our programming, we have put our heads together to come up with a stay-at-home monitoring plan for Chimney Swifts in Manitoba for spring 2020. We ask that you do not monitor from public spaces. Instead, this program is set up for monitoring from your own property, backyard, balcony, or window. We encourage people in all locations from rural countryside, to small town, to downtown to join in. We have tried to make the monitoring and reporting process as easy as possible. So hopefully you can sit back, relax, and see (or hear) some swifts!

he monitoring period will take place starting Wednesday, May 20^th. We will monitor every Wednesday from May 20^th to June 24^th (rain dates will be the Thursday of the same week). We ask that you start monitoring 20 minutes before sunset and continue monitoring for 10 minutes after sunset (for a total of 30 minutes). Similar to normal Chimney Swift monitoring, please also report basic weather conditions such as temperature, wind, and precipitation. The full monitoring protocol can be found here . Reporting is online through our website. The reporting form can be found here.

While our survey is focused on Chimney Swifts, we also ask that you keep an eye and ear out for other aerial insectivores (birds that catch insects while in flight) such as swallows and nightjars. Members of these groups of birds may be an indicator that one part of possible Chimney Swift habitat (food) is present. Additionally, many of these other aerial insectivores are also experiencing steep population declines, so monitoring their abundance is useful. As this year’s program is new, we have added a handy aerial insectivore identification factsheet at the end of the Stay-at-Home Monitoring Protocol.

While we are limited in our ability to gather this year, we hope you all can join us for this new and exciting chapter in Chimney Swift monitoring. Thank you to all of our volunteers past, present and future, as we get ready to welcome back our Chimney Swifts in 2020! If you have any questions about monitoring, the protocol or the reporting form please send me an email at mbchimneyswift@gmail.com.

Amanda Shave, Manitoba Chimney Swift Initiative Coordinator, on behalf of the MCSI Steering Committee (Christian Artuso, Ron Bazin, Neil Butchard, Lewis Cocks, Ken De Smet, Jack Dubois, Nicole Firlotte, Frank Machovec, Tim Poole, Barb Stewart and Rob Stewart)

A New Spin on 2020 Chimney Swift Monitoring in Manitoba

Since 2007, MCSI has grown an active engaged monitoring program, now growing to include participation in the National Roost Monitoring Program, Wednesday night blitzes and all-season nest monitoring. Over the past couple of years we have seen increasing volunteer participation, with more chimneys being watched than ever before. This has helped MCSI to identify over 50 new active sites in the past 3 years and swifts are being found in the breeding season in new communities such as Emerson and Neepawa.

Covid-19 has already affected a great many different programs and activities. For Chimney Swifts, we have learned all spring roost monitoring (NRMP), in Quebec, Ontario and the Maritime provinces has been cancelled. Many other field programs (such as the Breeding Bird Survey, and other research by government and research

organizations) have also been cancelled this summer. As medical professionals put their lives at risk during this pandemic, we have to assess our best course of action in Manitoba. As biologists and citizen scientists, we also have to support the significant efforts of our fellow medical scientists battling on different fronts to contain, study and beat this virus.

2020, MCSI will limit sponsorship of monitoring programs to a yard, balcony, or window-based Chimney Swift and aerial insectivore survey. We will be sending out a protocol and links to an online data submission tool by the middle of May, with our aim of beginning monitoring in the week of May 18th. Our goal is to create a survey that still uses citizen science to collect important data on Chimney Swifts, and at the same time attract new volunteers from people not previously engaged in our program. This approach might even reveal that swifts are breeding in previously unknown communities! With the additional of other aerial insectivores, we also hope to raise awareness of this threatened group of birds, including swallows, martins and nighthawks (although we will continue to focus on Chimney Swifts). We also hope that through catching the Chimney Swift bug, we might be able to recruit new neighborhood volunteers for our renewed monitoring program in the future.

MCSI will notify our valued monitors if a change in monitoring protocols is to be made. We did not take this decision lightly, but considered solidarity with currentpublic health advice, the ongoing need to social distance, need to limit travel distance, and wanting to demonstrate best practice, and avoid an image of biologists ignoring the public health threat. This will obviously be a disappointment to many people, but we believe the long-term benefits of this decision will outweigh the short-term loss of data. Even as the province opens up, many of our citizens will remain in their apartments, condos and homes, and we do not want our volunteers to be an added stress and burden at this time.

Every dark cloud has a silver lining. We look forward to you joining us with your participation in the “backyard” counts. We have seen a rise in the prevalence of backyard birding and local birding, and we hope to generate similar enthusiasm for Chimney Swifts and other aerial insectivores, as well all of us discovering the diversity of aerial insectivores in our own backyards.

Stay safe,

— Amanda Shave, Manitoba Chimney Swift Initiative Coordinator, on behalf of the MCSI Steering Committee (Christian Artuso, Ron Bazin, Neil Butchard, Lewis Cocks, Ken De Smet, Jack Dubois, Nicole Firlotte, Frank Machovec, Tim Poole, Barb Stewart and Rob Stewart)

Chimney Swifts have touched down in Canada!

Some exciting news to report as we all eagerly await the arrival of Chimney Swifts in Manitoba. Winnie Wake and friends at London’s Chimney Swift Program in southern Ontario received the first detailed sighting of a Chimney Swift in Canada on April 29^th. As Barb mentioned in the last blog post Winnie had previously said “Most years, swifts show up here in the last few days or week of April” and she had the timing down pat! Indeed a glance at eBird.org (https://ebird.org/map/chiswi?neg=true&env.minX=&env.minY=&env.maxX=&env.maxY=&zh=false&gp=false&ev=Z&mr=1-12&bmo=1&emo=12&yr=cur) shows multiple Chimney Swift sightings in southern Ontario. Closer to Manitoba, sightings have taken place in South Dakota and Minnesota.

We also have Winnie’s words of wisdom in where Chimney Swift watchers in Winnipeg, and around Manitoba might spot their first Swift of the season “Quite often, London’s early swifts are seen near the river corridor. They seem to know that aquatic insects tend to emerge a little earlier than land-based ones. That means the general area of the river likely offers better foraging prospects at a time of year when numbers of insects in the air are still relatively low.” With many Manitoba communities that host Chimney Swifts located around waterways, it can be a good place to keep watch for the early birds.

As the Chimney Swift come every closer to Manitoba – what can we do to help? If you have a fireplace, please remember to close the damper. The damper is the metal door that closes access from the hearth into the chimney flue. Closing the damper means that if you host Chimney Swifts this season, they will stay in the chimney where they belong, and you will avoid any accidental mishaps of Swifts ending up in your house! As well, stay tuned to the MCSI blog as we will have an update on MCSI monitoring coming soon.

–Amanda

Who could possibly have written a script for Earth Day 2020 that included living with a pandemic? Author Margaret Atwood might have. But she didn’t. However, as a master of dystopian literature, and student of history, she has offered an important perspective on our current reality.

Margaret Atwood reflected that “this is by no means the worst such episode that the world has ever seen”. Importantly, she offered that moments like these offer a “reset button opportunity” and that “Maybe we should look at the way we’ve been doing things and think of ways of doing them differently.”

( https://www.cbc.ca/radio/asithappens/as-it-happens-thursday-edition-1.5502954/margaret-atwood-waubgeshig-rice-and-daniel-kalla-share-their-pandemic-reading-lists-1.5502962 )

Yes, these are challenging times. Yes, there is great hope that life will improve. But there is no crystal ball to predict the “when” and “how it will happen”. For now, we live with a stark reminder of how inhabitants of Mother Earth are connected so intimately. We are all tasked with the responsibility of staying healthy – as individuals, community members, and global citizens. Let’s remember to extend our actions as people who need to be good stewards of the earth’s resources.

In Manitoba, there is much to appreciate in our natural world. That includes our birds. Chimney Swifts continue their northern migration, having now reached Minneapolis, MN. (https://ebird.org/map/chiswi?neg=true&env.minX=&env.minY=&env.maxX=&env.maxY=&zh=false&gp=false&ev=Z&mr=1-12&bmo=1&emo=12&yr=cur)

As we all look forward to our swift’s arrival in the next few weeks, the MCSI Steering Committee continues to discuss the upcoming monitoring season and rethink ways of safely engaging with the birds this year. In early May, we will talk about the 2020 Chimney Swift monitoring season as it is impacted by the COVID-19 crisis. We will factor in the current public health advisories and offer up some options having hit the “reset button”. Stay tuned for news flashes about MCSI monitoring, stewardship, outreach, and science activities planned for this year!

As for my Earth Day, it is time to splash through the floodwaters of the Red River which are marinating our acreage south of Winnipeg. The water levels are nothing dire this year thankfully, just another reminder that Mother Nature should not be taken for granted. Now it’s off to hear the high-flying cranes and dodge the low flying cormorants…hoping that it will be Chimney Swift sightings that fill the sky sooner than later!

— Barb Stewart

Roger Tory Peterson said “The truth of the matter is, the birds could very well live without us, but many — perhaps all — of us would find life incomplete, indeed almost intolerable without the birds.”

We are living in unsettled times, but much comfort and enjoyment can be found by staying connected to nature and birds. Stepping outside now, we are treated to the sounds of honking geese as they fly north in their ribbon-like strings. Robins are adding their voice to the dawn chorus. The distinctive “chip” of juncos resonates in the woods. It won’t be long before our Chimney Swifts add their chittering noises to the mix!

Amanda and Tim have been tracking Chimney Swift movement northward. You can follow the action using this eBird link: https://ebird.org/map/chiswi?neg=true&env.minX=&env.minY=&env.maxX=&env.maxY=&zh=false&gp=false&ev=Z&mr=1-12&bmo=1&emo=12&yr=cur

The spring migration is proceeding well with swifts reaching Illinois and Ohio. Arrivals in Canada will take place in the next several weeks. Our dear friend and super swift supporter in Ontario, Winnie Wake, shared “In an almost complete set of records going back to the late 1870s, London’s earliest date was Apr 2, 1967. The second earliest date was April 8, 1954. Prior to 1950 the earliest date was April 15, 1887. Most years, swifts show up here in the last few days or week of April.” In Manitoba, lone swifts have been spotted in early May, and the birds are usually about in greater numbers by mid-May. My Mother’s Day tradition is to head to the church in St Adolphe to scan the sky in the afternoon, as the menfolk slave over a celebratory dinner.

MCSI will continue to evaluate monitoring protocols and dates as ongoing health advisories are issued. Clearly, our normal lives are being challenged. But we can still keep grounded by looking up to the birds and, hopefully, by looking forward to sharing some swift time together (at a suitable social distance of course!).

— Take care, keep well, happy birding, Barb.

While the current situation of the COVID-19 outbreak is uncharted for us here at the Manitoba Chimney Swift Initiative, we wanted to let you know that we are still planning for an active season of Chimney Swift monitoring.

Under current government advice we do not foresee an issue with watching chimneys, as long as people keep a respectful distance from each other and practice preventative measures. If advice from the government changes, our program will adapt as necessary. For now, consider Chimney Swift watching a great reason to get out of the house and into the fresh air.

–  Amanda Shave

A new article by MCSI’s former Coordinator, Tim Poole, and Portage la Prairie swift volunteer extraordinaire, Gordon Ogilvie is in the Spring edition of the Blue Jay .

The article titled “Occupancy of Unconventional Nest and Roost Habitats by the Chimney Swift (Chaetura pelagica) in Manitoba” describes some of the different types of habitats found by MCSI volunteers in the past few years. Among the habitat structures discussed includes access chimneys through broken pest exclusion cages, using chimneys with a full clay-liner and use of smaller chimneys.

 Ahead of the upcoming spring migration, this is a wonderful opportunity to highlight the exceptional efforts of MCSI’s volunteers, many of whose efforts directly contributed to this piece. Thank you to everyone who continues to grow this program. If you are interested in becoming a volunteer, please email our new MCSI Coordinator, Amanda Shave, at mbchimney@gmail.com.

If you would like to read the new article, Blue Jay have kindly given us permission to post it on our website. You can find it here

— FJM

A

CHIMNEY SWIFTS – ALWAYS A SWEET BIRD OF INTEREST

Valentine’s Day is an inflection point. We are moving along in the New Year, coming out of the dead of winter. Signs of spring are appearing despite the intense cold mid-February can bring. On sunny, calm days the rat-a-tat-tat drumming of woodpeckers is audible and on still nights, the hooting of Great Horned Owls is a welcome sound. Some swelling of buds in poplar trees is noticeable. Best of all, we all are enjoying more daylight each day. It’s time to count the days until reports of spring migrants start coming in…our swifts will be on the move in a couple of weeks and their arrival in North America will be noted on eBird.

Before we move ahead to the new 2020 swift season in Manitoba, there is some looking back to do. The St Adolphe nest site activity summary for 2019 is now posted. It was another challenging year for breeding swifts with forest fire smoke, high heat and humidity, plus intense rain events. Six nest sites were occupied by a breeding pair of swifts; three pairs successfully fledged young. As was the case in recent years, the swifts departed St Adolphe by mid-August without forming any noticeable pre-migratory groups.

Bridging the 2019 and 2020 seasons, we had some local redistributions and migrations of our Steering Committee. We have also welcomed new members to the MCSI flock. In August, Christian Artuso moved to Ottawa to join Environment and Climate Change Canada but remains on the Steering Committee as chair for the time being. Ken De Smet retired from Manitoba Agriculture and Resource Development and Tim Poole left the MCSI Coordinator job to fill that provincial Species At Risk Biologist position. We welcomed new coordinator, Amanda Shave, and Jack Dubois from Nature Manitoba to our committee. Continuing on are Frank Machovec (our all-important webmaster), Nicole Firlotte (Manitoba Agriculture and Resource Development), Lewis Cocks and Neil Butchard (master birders both), Ron Bazin (Canadian Wildlife Service) plus Rob and Barb Stewart (Sila Consultants). Fortunately, everyone involved in the shifts ‘n’ shuffles remain committed to MCSI, so our work will continue with a full roster of active people.

A lot of behind the scenes planning has taken place by the Steering Committee. The monitoring program has been developed and work on various stewardship, conservation, and research projects is moving forward. A Blue Jay article on atypical nest site structures (got to love the free-thinking birds that they are) is in press and another article about Manitoba’s first successful mitigation project (Old Grace Hospital/Assiniboine Zoo tower) is about to be submitted for review.

So, watch for news flashes. The monitoring program rollout will begin soon with a “save the dates” request. We look forward to an active 2020 season – our 14^th year of monitoring Chimney Swifts in Manitoba – and the continued connection with our dedicated monitors!

–Barb Stewart