Swift Invasion : 2,000 Messy Birds Swoop Out of the Night Into Sylmar Home

Michael and Wendy Glover are self-styled bird lovers: they own two parrots, three cockateels and a dozen chickens.

But nothing in the Sylmar couple’s relatively tame avian experience prepared them for the Hitchcockian nightmare they endured Thursday night--an invasion of 2,000 birds through their chimney.

About 10:30 p.m., Michael Glover found three sparrow-size birds flapping about in the kitchen and laundry room. His wife decided to check the rest of the house, and opened the door to a hallway leading to the den.

“I turned on the light and there were a thousand birds, and they all started flying,” she said. “They were just caked on the walls. . . . You couldn’t see the walls. You couldn’t see anything except birds. . . . All I could think was to just get out of there. It was terrible.”

A massive flock of migrating birds, believed to be Vaux’s swifts, a close relative of chimney swifts, had swooped down the Glovers’ chimney and emerged through the fireplace to roost in the den and a bedroom.

City animal-control officials, who eventually removed the black-and-gray birds one by one, placed the number at 2,000.

“Every year we get reports of flocks of Vaux’s swifts descending into people’s chimneys,” said Kimball Garrett, ornithology collection manager for the Los Angeles County Museum of Natural History. “All they’re doing is roosting for the night, driven down by the cool or cloudy weather.”

But, he added, “That’s about the largest number I’ve ever heard of.”

Said Bob Pena, senior animal-control officer for the Los Angeles Animal Regulation Department: “This is probably a once-in-a-lifetime situation that we came across.”

Garrett said the birds migrate to forested areas of Northern California, western Canada and southwestern Alaska after wintering in Mexico and Central America. Usually, he said, they roost and build their fragile nests in the shelter of hollow trees.

But when traveling through urban landscapes, they find chimneys a civilized substitute, and there have been reports of hundreds invading a house, he said.

This did not fly with the Glovers, however.

It took three incredulous Animal Regulation Department staffers four hours to remove the feathery guests, Pena said.

At first, the city workers simply carried the birds outside the house and set them loose. Some just flew away but others flew back into the Glover house through the chimney and a sliding glass door to the den, Pena said.

Eventually, the city workers decided to put the birds in cardboard boxes--and when all of them were filled, rubber trash cans--and cart them away. About 600 of the birds were removed that way and released later elsewhere in Sylmar, he said.

“They appear to be in good health,” he said of the birds.

That’s more than can be said for the Glovers’ den and extra bedroom.

Wendy Glover fears her carpet, couches and walls may never be the same.

“It’s going to take me at least a week to clean it up,” the 24-year-old housewife said as she surveyed the foul scene. A previously off-white couch and rust-colored carpet had suddenly turned green with something other than envy. The walls were also peppered with swift droppings.

She recalled how the Night of the Swifts unfolded:

“At about 10:30 p.m. my husband and I heard a big crash in the back of our house. My husband went into the kitchen and found this one little bird, so he got a towel and he picked it up. . . . I said, ‘How cute, let’s keep it.’ . . .

“He went through the washroom and into the laundry room, and there were two more birds. So I decided I’d go through the back room and den and see if there were any more birds there. I thought maybe we left the sliding glass window open.

“I turned on the light and there were a thousand birds, and they were all flying. . . . I thought the roof caved in.”

She and her husband went outside, where they saw more birds flying into their chimney. She then called a friend.

“You wouldn’t believe my room,” she recalled saying. “It’s just wall-to-wall birds.”

The friend suggested that the Glovers contact the Animal Regulation Department. The city workers, clad in overalls and surgical gloves, picked up the birds and tossed them out the windows for hours. At one point, they thought they had finished the cleanup only to shine a flashlight up the chimney and discover about 500 more swifts lodged there.

They finished the job at 3:30 a.m., although a few of the uninvited visitors eluded them. Perhaps half a dozen birds remained housebound, though hardly housebroken, Friday.

Pena said the birds were able to invade the house because the Glovers did not have a spark arrester on the chimney, as required by the city fire code. Failure to cover a chimney with an aluminum plate with holes or heavy wire mesh is a misdemeanor and carries a maximum penalty of six months in jail and a $1,000 fine, Fire Inspector Ed Reed said.

Wendy Glover said they placed a wire-mesh cover on the chimney Friday.

Michael Glover said the only bird the couple usually keeps in the house, their African Grey Congo parrot, survived the ordeal from the safety of his wrought-iron cage.

“He was being his normal self. He was telling everybody, ‘Shut up!’ ”