Video — Vaux’s Swifts swarming into a chimney

I shot this with my Sony Cybershot DSC-N2, and used iMovie and the default iMovie “spooky” music.

Vaux’s swifts are tiny birds that are known for flocking en masse to chimneys and other enclosed spaces. This flock stops by a boarding school in Healdsburg, CA every September and forms a crazy bird vortex as the thousands of birds funnel into one chimney.

The big blob in the first part of the video is some sort of hawk. The little dots are all the Swifts. The second part, where the birds look bigger and inside of a black circle, was shot by sticking the camera into the back of a set of binoculars.

I have so much more respect for filmmakers now! It took some real time to edit what turned out to be about 20 seconds of pretty crappy video.

~ by linoleumjet on October 1, 2007.