Our last update on the locations of our Manitoba Chimney Swifts was in mid-September, as we ended off our Manitoba Chimney Swift Initiative monitoring season. I thought I would pop in with a quick “where are they now” for swifts across North America. For a quick reminder here is a map of the breeding, migration and nonbreeding ranges for Chimney Swifts. They breed across central and eastern Canada and the United States. On migration Chimney Swifts pass through Mexico, central America and the Caribbean before reaching the nonbreeding range in western south America.
Our next look in at the birds comes from the month of October in the image below. Here we can see that the pattern of citizen science sightings of Chimney Swifts has changed quite a bit. There are no more sightings in Manitoba. In Canada only one swift was seen in Montreal and some left in southern Ontario (most of these records are from the first week in October). Meanwhile, there are swifts reported on the Yucatan Peninsula and in Belize, Honduras, Nicaragua, Costa Rica and Panama in central America. New on this map are the presence of some Chimney Swifts who have reached their winter range with sightings of at least 85 individuals across Colombia.
At least if we can’t travel this winter, we can live vicariously through the Chimney Swifts! Stay tuned for future migration updates as we head into late fall.
If you’d like to look at the Chimney Swift maps in more detail below is the link in eBird for all data so far in 2020. You can change the date range for Chimney Swift sightings in the top right-hand corner. You can also zoom in to see exactly where the swifts were sighted (as an example, check out Bogota, Colombia) and see what kinds of habitat they are using during migration and the nonbreeding period.
Follow this link for the current eBird species map.
–Amanda Shave
