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September 10 @ 7:00 pm - 8:30 pm
Nature Night: 25 Million and Counting – Monitoring Vaux’s Swift Migration
Virtual
Pilchuck Audubon’s “Vaux’s Happening” Project began in 2007 as a successful effort to save a school chimney that was one of only two well-known, highly used Vaux’s Swift roost sites in Washington State. This quickly expanded into an attempt to locate, raise awareness of, and hopefully preserve the important roost sites used by this species all along their entire migratory path. The project has now documented over 200 roosts from the Yukon to Guatemala used by over 25 million swifts during the last 33 migrations. Project Coordinator Larry Schwitters will share images and information captured by the project’s chimney surveillance cameras, precision temperature recorders, and radio tracking transmitters.
About Larry
Larry Schwitters, on a National Science Foundation Scholarship, earned a Master of Science degree from East Texas State University and spent thirty years in the trenches of public education, mostly as a middle school science teacher and coach in the Renton School District in Washington. After an early retirement, his first involvement with the avian Apodidae family was Black Swift field research for the American Bird Conservancy. His last 17 years have focused on the smaller Vaux’s Swift and the “Vaux’s Happening” project. Larry was recently published by Cornell in the Birds of the World online resource’s Vaux’s Swift species update that Schwitters and his grandson wrote together. He was also selected as the 2024 National Audubon volunteer of the yeaa.
