ML591468161

Age and sex

Juvenile, Unknown sex - 5

Tags

Nest

Media notes

5 nestling Chimney Swifts

Observation details

I sat in the shade trying to photograph Chimney Swifts entering their brick chimney nest at 506 Erie Street. They flew so fast, it was almost impossible to react fast enough to trigger the shutter while they were in frame. My camera was on a tripod in the yard, triggered from across the yard with a remote. I had the camera’s shutter speed set at 1/2500 of a second to freeze them in flight without motion blur. I was using a 100mm-400mm zoom lens. They only fed their young once about every 15-20 minutes despite it being 88 degrees, relatively calm, and sunny. Their feeding strategy is to bring in huge mouthfuls of tiny insects that caused their mouths to bulge on bottom (see photos). To get the photographic close-ups of the nest and nestlings, I placed an extension ladder against the chimney, climbed to the top of it, then aimed the camera with a flash and short telephoto lens down the chimney 72” to the nest. For these photos, I was using a 70mm-200mm zoom lens. The biggest problem was that the chimney was so dark inside that I had trouble manually focusing the lens on the nest as did the camera when I switched to autofocus. In the nest photos, you can see there are 5 nestlings already crowding their tiny stick and saliva nest. Their eyes are still grown closed and their feather tracts are beginning to show. Notice in the one nest photo, that the old nest off to the side corner is starting to separate from the brick wall. In the close-ups of the twig nest, you can see the shiny, amber-colored glue, produced by the adults’ specialized saliva glands to adhere the twigs to each other and the entire nest to the bricks.

Technical information

Model

Canon EOS-1D X Mark II

Lens

EF70-200mm f/2.8L IS II USM

ISO

500

Focal length

88 mm

Flash

Flash fired

f-stop

f/8.0

Shutter speed

1/250 sec

Dimensions

2750 pixels x 1734 pixels

Original file size

3.86 MB