Bill and I have studied birds for many years (me since I was a child), so when we moved to our new house, I was curious as to what we would find.

Watching birds in the summer is the best — everyone is back, nest-building and foraging.

Our new yard is amazing, filled with Baltimore orioles, scarlet tanagers, goldfinches, catbirds, hummingbirds and mockingbirds, all of which we feed.

But we also have Chimney Swifts (Chaetura pelagica)!

A few years ago, on our way home from visiting family in northern Mississippi, we stopped at a Chimney Swift sanctuary. It was amazing. We spoke with people in the know and found out so much about it.

First, they are severely threatened due to lack of habitat. Second, they eat up to 15,000 insects a day (top that Martins!).

Chimney Swifts live in eastern North America, migrating from the Amazon basin each spring to summer here.

They are called “cigars with wings” (Kaufman, Ken; “Field Guide to Birds of North America”). They are brownish black, 5.5 inches long with an 11-inch wingspan.

Their feet are adapted so that they cannot perch on branches, but they have long claws to cling to walls of dead trees or chimneys. Their long narrow curved wings give fast wingbeats and rapid flight.

In the early days, these resourceful birds nested in hollow trees, but as settlers built they began roosting in chimneys, as their numbers soared.

In recent years chimneys have been built of metal (so no clinging) and since the 1960s their numbers have declined drastically. That was the message of this sanctuary, as we visited the “Swift towers,” human-made structures to house these fierce insect-eating machines.

All day they fly in the air, aerial acrobats, twittering and chirping, as now they are teaching the young to hunt.

They turn, glide, and even bathe in the air, as they never give up the hunt for insects.

I want to build a tower of our own and register it, so we can have more Swifts in our area.

To build a tower is a job, to have it is a conservancy of a species to keep in the future.

Hughes is an Ohio State University Extension Master Gardener Volunteer in Mahoning County.