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Don Torino: On Ridgewood's Chimney Swifts


Our friend Don Torino's latest column for the wildnewjersey.tv blog is about Ridgewood's Chimney Swifts.

Here's the opening: "Like a day at Hogwarts, more than a thousand strangely shaped birds gather in the sky at dusk. Never stopping to perch or rest, they soon begin to form an almost mystical circle in the air around a large old chimney atop a children’s school. 

"As if given some kind of magical signal, they begin to drop into the chimney. 450 a minute descend into the dark vertical tunnel for the evening. This continues until as many as 2,000 birds vanish for the night into the depths of an unseen place, a scene that would make Harry Potter gaze in amazement. But this is no fantasy. This is real life - an amazing story of survival that repeats itself every September at George Washington Middle School in Ridgewood. 

"Swifts are amazing creatures. They are highly urbanized birds that can eat about 1/3 of their weight every day in insects, which could mean about a thousand mosquitos. They hunt for bugs in close flying flocks. You can hear their high-pitched chipping call long before you ever see them."

The rest of Don's column is here. (That's Don on the left in the photo above, and Swift advocate/expert Kurt Muenz on the right; photo by Mike Malzone.)

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