Witness : Window

Every fall, thousands of chimney swifts gather over towns and cities across North America. As evening approaches, they circle above old chimneys building into great swirling clouds before pouring into their roosts for the night. It’s one of the most spectacular wildlife gatherings you can witness, and it happens right in the middle of places we live.

Chimney swifts are extraordinary birds. They spend almost their entire lives in flight, catching insects on the wing and traveling thousands of miles between North and South America. They’re more closely related to hummingbirds than to the swallows they resemble. For centuries, they’ve adapted to our changing landscapes, trading the hollow trees of eastern forests for the brick chimneys of our towns and cities.

But their numbers have fallen dramatically. According to the Cornell Lab of Ornithology, North America lost an estimated 74% of its chimney swifts between 1966 and 2023. What is happening to these birds, and what can we learn from the people paying attention to them?

In this episode of Witness Window, we meet three North Carolinians whose work with chimney swifts brings together poetry, natural history, scientific research, and community observation.

Bill Griffin, a poet, naturalist, and longtime volunteer with the USGS Breeding Bird Survey, opens the episode with a poem inspired by swifts gathering above a historic Raleigh bus garage. Bill has spent more than 30 years counting birds along the same stretches of the North Carolina foothills, witnessing changes that can be difficult to recognize from one season to the next. We talk about what poetry and scientific observation have in common, how we remember the landscapes of our childhoods, and why simply noticing the creatures around us matters.

Dr. Andrew Laughlin, an ornithologist at UNC Asheville, introduces us to the fascinating and surprisingly mysterious social lives of chimney swifts. Why do thousands of birds gather at particular chimneys? How do they choose their nightly roosts? And where do they go when a familiar gathering place disappears? Andrew and his collaborators are combining years of local observations with radio-tracking technology to better understand how swifts move through the landscape, and how we might protect the places they depend on.

Barbara Driscoll, of the New Hope Bird Alliance, takes us to the historic Davie Poplar on the UNC campus in Chapel Hill, where more than a thousand swifts gather for the night. It’s an opportunity to experience these birds not as an abstract conservation concern, but as lively, noisy, remarkable neighbors.

Along the way, we explore the connections between birds and buildings, science and poetry, memory and observation. Bill suggests that naturalists and poets share the same basic toolkit: paying attention, asking questions, making connections, and sharing what they discover.

Witness Window explores the species and places that are changing around us through conversations with the scientists, artists, writers, and naturalists who know them best. It’s an invitation to look a little more closely at the world we share, and to discover what we might otherwise miss.

If you enjoy the episode, please subscribe, give it a like, and share it with someone curious about the natural world. Your support helps this independent project reach new listeners and bring more stories to life.

Episode music, art and interviews by Matt Stansberry.

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit witnesswindow.substack.com

Witness Window, Observations on a Vanishing Present is a podcast about our moment in time and the once common species and phenomena disappearing within our living generation. This is the video companion to Episode 2: In the Fade, about Chimney Swifts.

I’m sticking with my Queens of the Stone Age theme until I run out of song titles I like. And the name of this episode is In the Fade, a song featuring Mark Lanegan, one of my favorite vocalists. It reminded me of the chimney swifts sitting in a chimney, thinking of getting back to South America in the morning.

Cracks in the ceiling, crooked pictures in the hall

Countin’ and breathin’, I’m leaving here tomorrow

They don’t know, I’d never do you any good

Laughing is easy, I would if I could

Ain’t gonna worry

Just live ‘til you die, I wanna drown

With nowhere to fall into the arms of someone

There’s nothin’ to save, and I know

You live ‘til you die

I was inspired to write the episode music by a trip to the Davie Poplar, which you see in this video. This is a 400 year old tulip tree on the UNC campus in Chapel Hill, where one of our interview subjects, New Hope Bird Alliance board member Barbara Driscolll, discovered one of the only modern documented cases of chimney swifts using hollow trees instead of human-made structures for roosting.

The music is trying to capture what it must feel like to be a swift circling a roost entry, watching all these other swifts in your periphery as you flutter in tighter concentric circles until you settle into the dark.

In this episode I also interview Ornithology professor Dr. Andrew Laughlin about what he thinks the swifts are thinking as they circle the hole of their chosen roost, and he said he liked two competing theories…

One was that the swifts were counting, circling outside of the roost let the birds assess whether they all were going to fit. The other idea was that none of them really wanted to go in at all. They’re vulnerable. So they delay until the last second. I said, Dr. Laughlin, I think they could both be true. It’s literally two kinds of people.

For background on these birds, I recommend checking out the Birds of a Feather Talk Together Podcast, a couple ornithologists from the Field Museum and birding enthusiasts in Chicago. Episode 154 is about Chimney Swifts, and like one of the hosts, I was fascinated to learn that most swifts actually copulate on the wing. But chimney swifts copulate inside chimneys. Which raises the question of whether or not we influenced swift sex. Did the change in venue change their act of sex? Or is the behavioral flexibility part of what made them successful switching from trees to chimneys in the first place?

When David Wilson and I were creating the Rust Belt Arcana Tarot, we assigned Chimney Swifts to the Eight of Swords, which had themes of confinement. I was going to back to listen o some interviews I’d conducted with folks who had inspired me in the writing of the book and create of the deck. And for the a friend from the natural history museum in NYC, talking about confinement and lockdowns in NYC during COVID, and watching the chimney swifts at sunset.

She shared a great memory of staying in her grandparents house when she was a kid, there was a chimney in her bedroom, and she could hear the swifts nesting in the chimney, the fledglings begging for food, and sometimes the babies would fall out of the nests, down into the fireplace and then fly around the room. I’ve included a link to the video in the show notes.

I want to hear more more of your memories.

I’ve created a speakpipe inbox and would love to hear your recollections of the species we’re talking about on the show. If you have a story about ash trees or chimney swifts go to SpeakPipe.com/WitnessWindow and leave us your short recording of your memory about our vanishing present.

Go out to the bar this weekend at dusk somewhere with a bunch of chimneys, look up into the sky, and talk about what you see into your phone and then go play In the Fade on the jukebox.

This epsisode’s art is ink and collage by me.

Witness Window Episode Two inbound in early October. Staytuned and share your stories with us on SpeakPipe. Thanks for listening.

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit witnesswindow.substack.com

Witness Window, Observations on a Vanishing Present is a podcast about our moment in time and the once common species and phenomena disappearing within our living generation.

When it makes sense, I’d like each episode of Witness Window to have a second piece alongside it: something more personal and visual that explains why I was drawn to the subject in the first place. The podcast can follow the larger story of what is happening to a species, a landscape or an ecosystem, while these videos stay closer to the particular encounter that made me want to understand it.

I also want these follow-up posts to create more room for the people whose work helped shape the episode. Their contributions inevitably extend beyond what fits into a conversation, so I’ll use this space to point toward the projects, art, research and ideas they are pursuing on their own.

As a hunter who cares deeply about wildlife, I asked Gina Siepel about a tension I recognize: what it means to love a living thing while also using it. She said that question became the foundation of her project To Understand a Tree.

For years, Siepel approached woodworking through sustainability: using local species, avoiding tropical or threatened woods, conserving material and minimizing waste. Eventually, she began to feel that those choices were sidestepping the deeper question. We are surrounded by wood and dependent on trees, even as we talk about protecting forests. What does it actually mean to participate in that relationship?

Working with Smith College’s MacLeish Field Station, Siepel spent about five years studying a single tree, in close collaboration with naturalist and botanist Kate Wellspring. Together they examined the tree’s ecological community and Siepel’s place within it, asking whether a woodworker could be understood as part of that community or primarily as a threat to it. She came out of the project with a very different way of thinking about her relationship to trees.

Siepel’s Three Variations on a Shaker Chair carries that inquiry into the material itself. In one piece, Light, she made a Shaker-style chair from an ash killed by emerald ash borer, coated it in cyanotype fluid, then brought it back to the tree’s stump to expose it to sunlight one last time, creating an homage to photosynthesis. In another, Time, she traced the tree’s growth rings in ten-year increments and carried those lines through the construction of the chair, turning the finished object into a record of the tree’s life.

Josh Winkler is currently developing two overlapping bodies of work focused on fragile and unusual landscapes. In Natural Magic, he highlights striking natural phenomena that can spark curiosity about the American landscape, including the iridescent “rainbow swamps” of the Carolinas and petrified forests.

A related series, Finding the North and the South, explores the sky-island ecosystems of the southern Appalachians. Winkler is interested in the way high-elevation forests in North Carolina resemble the northern forests he knew in Minnesota, the Yukon and Alaska.

Winkler’s thinking about sky islands is also informed by Andrea Wulf’s The Invention of Nature, her biography of Alexander von Humboldt. He points in particular to Humboldt’s early drawings of mountain ecosystems, which mapped changes in vegetation across elevation. That way of seeing a mountain as a stack of distinct ecological zones has become a useful reference for Winkler as he thinks about the isolated high-elevation forests of the southern Appalachians.

By tracing those ecological connections, he is also examining how warming temperatures are increasing the vulnerability of these already fragile mountain ecosystems.

I asked Winkler how he holds onto a sense of joy while working so closely with ecological loss. He described hiking in western North Carolina, experiencing the mountains, weather, and beings in his new home landscape as an antidote to despair.

He also pointed to work that gives him reason for hope. At Grayson Highlands, he met a Virginia Tech forestry researcher studying the soils around Mount Rogers and the remaining spruce-fir forests there. The research is helping explore whether planting red spruce between isolated patches could create ecological corridors, reconnect populations and increase genetic diversity. Stay tuned for episode two, and like, comment and subscribe to Witness Window. Thanks!

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit witnesswindow.substack.com

Welcome to Witness : Window, observations on a vanishing present. This is a podcast about our moment in time and the once common species and phenomena disappearing within our living generation. It's about the more than human beings we're sharing this moment with. This is an episode about lingering ash, about the disappearance of one of North America's hardwoods. It has echoes of similar compounding losses going back generations, but it's also a story about hope and resilience and presence.

In this episode, I interview lingering ash researcher, US Forest Service biologist, Dr. Kathleen Knight, about the future of ash trees on our landscape. I talked to Gina Siepel, a woodworker in the Connecticut River Valley, about how this tree shapes her art. And I chat with printmaker and monument sculptor, Josh Winkler, about experiencing the ash die off that's followed him around the continent.

Visit witnesswindow.substack.com to see show notes and artwork.

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit witnesswindow.substack.com