What Is North America’s Most Mysterious Bird?
What Is North America’s Most Mysterious Bird?
On a hot, dry July evening, a dentist named Mike Hurtado leads two biologists into a narrow, windy stretch of the St. Charles River canyon in southern Colorado. Hurtado grew up hiking around here, and he and his family still refer to this part of the canyon reverentially as “The Place.” Its high granite walls usually echo with the sound of falling water, but the river is at the lowest point Hurtado can remember, and its waterfalls have turned to mere trickles. He and the biologists hope to catch a black swift, and the conditions don’t look promising.
Black swifts, Cypseloides niger, are among the most enigmatic birds in North America. Though the species has a huge range, breeding as far south as Honduras and as far north as Alaska, the birds’ preference for nesting on steep, wet, cold rock faces—ideally behind waterfalls—means that students of black swifts need sure feet, steady nerves and an almost obsessive sense of mission. The birds’ love of forbidding places also means that no one knows if the species is increasing or decreasing, or exactly what the birds need to survive and reproduce. With the help of amateur bird-watchers like Hurtado, biologists in Colorado and elsewhere have begun a multiyear search for black swifts, hoping to solve these mysteries.
As the light starts to fade, Hurtado and his two companions, Rocky Mountain Bird Observatory ornithologist Jason Beason and U.S. Forest Service biologist Ron Torretta, reach a black swift nest site, a shallow cave in a dark rock wall. Since 2009, Beason and his colleagues have fit a few birds with geolocators—vitamin-size devices that record sunrise time and day length, data that can be used to calculate a bird’s location within about 100 miles. The year before, Beason had attached a geolocator to a female bird from this cave. Black swifts are known to return to the same nesting sites season after season, and tonight Beason hopes to recapture both the bird and her data-filled geolocator.