wolfhollowwildlife.org
Skagit Valley Herald,
By Teresa Goffredo
MOUNT VERNON – Witnesses expressed outrage Friday after watching county housing authority workers scraping swallows’ nests off a five-story downtown apartment building, killing between 20 and 60 hatchlings who were too young to fly and fell to their deaths.
“Baby birds were falling and splatting all over the cars and sidewalk and the road. It was a pretty grim scene,” said witness Gale Sterrett, development coordinator for the habitat protection group Skagit Land Trust. “At one point I had to close my window shade. It was very upsetting.” John Smith, executive director of the Housing Authority of Skagit County, submitted a letter this week to the Skagit Valley Herald addressing the issue. In the letter, Smith said his agency removed the swallow’s nests in response to complaints about health and safety because of the large amounts of bird droppings accumulating on Myrtle Street outside the President apartments. The housing authority owns President Apartments, 310 Myrtle St. But Smith also wrote that “had the situation been considered more fully the action would not have taken place.”
One legal point housing authority officials didn’t consider was that destroying the 30 or so swallows’ nests at the apartment building was a violation – a misdemeanor – of the federal Migratory Bird Act.
But State Fish and Wildlife officials say it’s common for people to unknowingly violate that law, and it’s unlikely that any prosecution will occur. “It’s one of the easiest laws to inadvertently violate,” said Russell Link, a state urban wildlife biologist in Mill Creek. “A person may not know they violated the act but people should know that.”
Swallows – small, swooping birds with pointed wings – should be held in high regard as one of the region’s leading insect-eating birds, with their favorite food being mosquitoes, Link said Link also noted that swallows may nest near humans for protection because the birds somehow think people keep away predators like crows. But the swallows living underneath the cornice of the President apartments might have felt far from protected Wednesday.
Housing authority maintenance employees working from inside the building’s fifth-floor apartments leaned out of apartment windows and used a long-handled device with a blade at the end to scrape the swallows’ artfully crafted mud nests off the building’s cornice onto the street below. After removing the nests, the workers used high-pressure hoses to wash away the bird droppings from the street.
“It was a terrible sight and such a shock,” said witness Martha Bray, executive director of the Skagit Land Trust. The land trust has offices across the street from where the swallows had nested.
The Skagit Land Trust “is trying to save natural habitat and we see a little bit of it across the street being destroyed,” Bray said Friday. “It’s pretty sad and ironic.”
Bray and others aware of the swallows’ demise all asked the same question when they discussed the incident: Why didn’t the housing authority just wait a few weeks until the baby birds were old enough to fly away?
“It was uncalled for, very uncalled for,” said David Peveto, who lives above Hugo Helmer Music Inc. on First Street. Peveto tried to save two of the stranded swallows who had fallen into the street by putting them in a box and placing a towel over the box. But Peveto was told to leave the box on the street, and overnight a hungry cat got the baby swallows.
Peveto didn’t know he could bring the hatchlings to Wolf Hollow Wildlife Rehabilitation Center, a wildlife rescue agency based on San Juan Island, but which also serves Skagit County.
One of the baby swallows ultimately made it to the home of Roremary Orr, a representative of Wolf Hollow based in Anacortes. “My concern is had (the housing authority) waited three weeks, they could have destroyed empty nests,” Orr said.
Another swallow survivor made it into the hands of Karen Hall-Flickner, office manager for Peters and Cain accounting, which is located on the first floor of the President Apartments building. Hall-Flickner said she saw the baby bird in the street Wednesday. Since then, she has put the bird in a cage in her office and has been feeding it with a syringe.
Before the swallows’ nests were removed Wednesday, Hall-Flickner said she had made several calls to try to get the bird droppings cleaned from the sidewalk in front of her office. One call she made was to the Mount Vernon Street Department. Street department officials told her, however, that the street was not part of their jurisdiction because the building was owned by the housing authority.
Hall-Flickner then called the housing authority. But she said she wasn’t complaining about the nests. She just wanted someone to come and wash the sidewalk twice a week. She said she certainly didn’t want the swallows’ nests destroyed.
“Obviously the ultimate solution was for the nests to be removed but either: A when they were first noticed before the babies were hatched or B, wait another week or two for the babies to leave the nest,” Hall-Flickner said. Street department officials told Hall they had recommended to the housing authority that the nests be removed in September, after the baby birds had flown away.
So, street department officials were quite surprised the housing authority had already scraped the nests away, Hall said. In his letter to the community, housing authority Director Smith was contrite. “In retrospect, we aught to have waited a few weeks until the birds being raised had left the nests, but complaints about health and safety prompted action,” Smith wrote.
“These birds are likely to attempt to nest in the same place next season,” he wrote. In the future, one would hope that with shared responsibility, cooperation and goodwill that birds will be preserved and health and safety will also be maintained.”
But for some downtown residents and workers, the excuse about health and safety didn’t fly.
“So the sidewalk’s a little messy,” said Peveto. “I was raised on a farm and I’ve learned to step around that stuff.”
Though most of the swallows’ nests were scraped off the Myrtle Street side of the apartment building, about 50 nests remain in front of the building on First Street. Those nests weren’t removed because the awning in front of the building prevents the bird droppings from reaching the street. Smith said there were no plans to remove these nests this summer. Still, Skagit Land Trust Director Bray wonders why humans can’t be better at accommodating wildlife.
“We need to learn to live with wildlife. It’s so wonderful to have these birds in the city. They’re native species and managing to get by in the city,” Bray said. “I really enjoyed seeing them every morning.”
(Note – in fact 4 nestling Cliff Swallows were sent to Wolf Hollow as a result of this event. They were raised along with a number of other young swallows and have now been released back into the wild.
We hope that people will learn a couple of things from this disturbing event – a) It is against federal law to destroy the nests of native bird species, both when there are eggs in the nest and when the young have hatched. b) there is rarely any need to knock down nests just because droppings are landing on sidewalks, decks etc. A simple awning or board, attached to the wall just a few feet below the nest will catch the droppings. This can then be taken down and cleaned once a year in fall, and replaced ready for the next nesting season.)
