Whither, Swift?

The chimney swift is one of the swiftest small birds alive (up to 150 m.p.h.). Until last week no one had ever been able to say where it was going in such a hurry, when it took off for the winter. The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service had banded 375,000 swifts, never traced a one to its winter hideout. For lack of a better theory, some naturalists surmised that the swifts buried themselves in swamps to hibernate.

Indian hunters in a South American jungle produced the first evidence of the swifts' winter whereabouts--13 bands taken from birds they had killed. The place: the Yanayaco River valley in Peru. The birds had been banded in Tennessee, Illinois, Connecticut, Alabama, Georgia, Ontario. Cried Frederick C. Lincoln, official U.S. observer of bird migrations: "One of the most important ornithological discoveries in at least two decades."

Ornithologist Lincoln added that the swift discovery left only one North American bird-mapping mystery unsolved: where nests the bristle-thighed curlew?* No one has ever found its nest or eggs.

*Not to be confused with the bird that the late great Poet Yeats rebuked:

O, curlew, cry no more in the air

Or only to the waters in the West,

Because your crying brings to my mind

Passion-dimmed eyes and long heavy hair

That was shaken out over my breast.

There is enough evil in the crying of the wind.

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