CHIMNEY-SWIFT. The small, sooty, swal low-like bird, commonly but mistakenly called a `swallow,' which throngs about chimneys in all parts of North America, and represents an almost cosmopolitan family. (See SwIrr.) It is mi gratory, spreading northward into Labrador and the Fur Countries in early summer, and escap ing in winter to Central America. Supported upon narrow wings. each an inell longer than its total length (about five inches) from beak to tail, it spends its time almost continuously in the air, rarely if ever alighting except inside the hollow tee or chimney where it and ceaselessly pursuing, openmouthed. the minute insects upon which it lit-es, eatching all of them on the wing, and doing its an important service. It even gathers in this way the materials for its nest, grasping with its feet tiny dead twigs pro jecting from lofty tree branches. them off rind bearing them away, without. a pause in its Ili ht. Before the civiliza tion of the country. as yet in remote districts. it in habited hollow trees, some times for hundreds of g,en eration: in suevession, attaching its nest to their interior wall; but as soon as houses were built, the old trees were abandoned for the new chim neys, the superior attractiveness of which lies in greater safety, and in better satisfying a racial tendency to inhabit eaves. In some northerly dis
tricts these birds are latterly abandoning chim neys for attics and similarly sheltered, but light, situations. The nest is formed of small twigs, glued together by the bird's saliva, shaped like a half-cup, or hollowed bracket, and glued to the in terior wall of the chimney. The eggs. four to six, are small and pure white; and it is some time after the nestlings arc fledged before they are permitted to scramble out and try their wings. In these chimneys. or trees. the swift sleep at night, clinging upright with their long toes to the surface, and supported upon the stiff spine-tipped feathers of the tail. firmly pressed against the wall. In accustomed and favorable place, large flocks live together; and one of the most familiar and pleasing exhibitions of Amer ican bird-life is to watch the swifts at sunset circling in a twittering crowd about the chimney top, into which, as dusk conies on, they drop, one after the other, as if each went down the vortex of a whirlpool. The scientific name of the common species of the United States is rlicetu•a pclagica. See Plate of SWIFTS AND TDEIR NESTS.