Swifts Keep People Guessing What’s in the Sky

Along the 800 block of South Broadway in downtown Los Angeles, opinion was divided last week about the winged creatures that have been swirling around the upper reaches of buildings, cluttering the evening sky in dark fluttering clouds.

“They get started about 5:30 and go on ‘til late at night, thousands of them,” security guard Dwayne Albert said authoritatively. “And they ain’t birds.” He was certain: They’re bats. “They’re small. They fly like bees, in circles, and some of them fly in reverse.”

In a parking lot across the street, Claudius, another security guard, was positive too. Those had to be pigeons that were splattering cars and asphalt with their droppings.

“Just look at these cars,” he said, waving toward a line of white-speckled hoods. “This is the bombing ground. You can just be walking around and it’ll come down on your feet and your shoulders. I know it’s pigeons. They’re the only ones who do this. The other birds go home and do it.”

Actually, the ornithologists at the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County say the dark swarms that have been swooping above downtown the last few weeks are Vaux’s Swifts, passing through Los Angeles on their way to their wintering grounds in Central America.

“I think there’s a popular misconception that they’re bats and not birds,” noted museum ornithologist Kimball Garrett, who said 10,000 to 20,000 of the swifts have been roosting downtown in recent weeks.

“It’s a normal annual thing, not some unprecedented invasion with an unknown cause. They’re just migrating and found an appropriate place to stop over. For some reason there are more of them this year.”

Ledges above the grimy, noisy streets of downtown seem an unlikely hotel for birds, but Garrett said a lot of the migrating flock are inexperienced youngsters on their first trip south.

“They’d probably never seen a building or a person until they arrived here. If you get into the psyche of a bird, there’s really no reason they’d perceive a building as different from a cliff face or a tall tree.”

The narrow-winged swifts arrived in mid-September, Garrett said, and probably will be all but gone by mid-October. They will pass through the region again in April and May on their way to their northern breeding grounds, which extend from Northern California to western Canada.

So for a time, the birds, which measure less than five inches long, have taken to the downtown air at dusk to wheel and jink above city streets. They look “like a cigar with wings,” according to famed ornithologist Roger Tory Peterson.

While resting up here, they have become airborne commuters of a sort. They spend their days flying across the basin, gobbling up what insects they can find, then returning to the high-rises at night in time to provide a spectacle for homebound workers who don’t always appreciate nature’s handiwork.

“Oh God, they’re pretty disgusting,” said Vanessa Klopmeyer, a fashion marketing representative who works in one of the buildings favored by the swifts. There were none to be seen as she ate lunch on the building patio Friday, but there was no shortage of evidence that the swifts were recently there.

“We just added it to the charms of downtown Los Angeles,” said her friend, Renee Giovannoni, decidedly unimpressed with those charms. “It made me think about ‘The Birds,’ ” the Alfred Hitchcock film in which screaming flocks of birds take their revenge for centuries of human abuse.