Just south of Franklin Street near the Old Well, a tulip poplar that has stood for more than 400 years is drawing crowds at dusk this September, as thousands of chimney swifts spiral overhead before diving into a hollow in its trunk. The Davie Poplar on the UNC-Chapel Hill campus is hosting free public watch parties on September 8 and September 28 at 7 p.m., with more gatherings planned in Durham later in the month.
The Davie Poplar cavity is believed to be the only known natural tree roosting site for chimney swifts left in North Carolina, since the birds now rely almost exclusively on man-made brick chimneys, according to the National Audubon Society. As reported by the Raleigh News & Observer, longtime birder Anne Dayer, who has attended swift watches for eight years, said viewing the birds from a lawn near the tree brings observers closer to the swifts than watching them enter an industrial chimney elsewhere in the Triangle. Barbara Driscoll, who first noticed thousands of swifts circling the Davie Poplar in late August 2024, told the paper she was excited that the birds were using a protected tree.
The UNC Avian Society co-hosts the Davie Poplar events, held on McCorkle Place, with parking available in nearby decks and at the Morehead Planetarium. Attendees are advised to bring binoculars, jackets and something to sit on. A photo caption from the site shows swifts entering the cavity on September 18, 2024, credited to photographer Travis Long.
Durham's Chimney Alternatives
New Hope Bird Alliance and its partners are hosting free, family-friendly chimney swift watch parties around the Triangle throughout September. The Durham Hotel rooftop at 315 E. Chapel Hill St. will host a watch party at 6:30 p.m. on September 22, and the Velvet Hippo at 119 W. Orange St. will hold one at 7 p.m. on September 29, focused on swifts entering the historic Mechanics and Farmers Bank chimney at sunset, per the National Audubon Society. New Hope Bird Alliance was previously known as the New Hope Audubon Society until its membership voted in May 2024 to drop “Audubon” from its name, citing John James Audubon's history with slavery and racial theories, according to the organization's own account.
Chimney swifts cannot perch on tree branches the way most birds do. Their feet have a swiveling hind toe that lets all four claws point forward, allowing them to cling to vertical bark and brick using opposable toes and a stiff, spiny tail, according to the Maryland Bird Conservation Partnership. The birds fly 30 to 40 mph, use visual cues to avoid colliding with one another mid-air, and build their chimney nests from small twigs gathered in flight and glued together with saliva. Their genus name, Apodidae, means “without feet.”
A Bigger Story Behind the Spectacle
The swift-nados are a festive sight, but they reflect a harder ecological reality. Barbara Driscoll said the global chimney swift population has dropped 50% over the last 50 years, and that there are not enough insects left for the birds to eat. Chimney swifts eat mosquitoes, gnats and moths, consuming up to one-third of their body weight daily in flying insects, and researchers suspect that insect decline is a hidden driver of broader bird declines, per the News & Observer's reporting.
That local concern echoes continental data. A landmark study led by the Cornell Lab of Ornithology and published in Science found that North America has lost nearly 3 billion breeding birds, roughly 29% of its total avian population, since 1970, with aerial insectivores like swifts and swallows among the hardest hit. In Canada, similar drops among aerial insectivores prompted the federal government to designate the chimney swift as a Threatened species under the Species at Risk Act after the national population fell 90% since the 1970s, according to Nature Canada.
Bird surveys closer to home tell a similarly grim story. Jin Bai, community science committee chair with New Hope Bird Alliance, reported that Hollow Rock Nature Park, surveyed in 2025, had 69% of species with declining territory density or missing entirely compared with Mason Farm surveys from the 1980s. The New Hope Bottomlands, surveyed in 2024 by New Hope Bird Alliance, the N.C. Biodiversity Project and the Durham County Open Space Program, had 56% of species declining or missing over the same period. The red-eyed vireo declined to roughly half its 1980s numbers at Hollow Rock and to just 20% of its 1980s numbers at the New Hope Bottomlands, while the acadian flycatcher showed similar drops. Wood thrush, hooded warbler, Kentucky warbler, ovenbird and scarlet tanager were not holding breeding territories at either surveyed site. Not every local survey painted a bleak picture, though: a White Pines Nature Preserve survey in Chatham County found moths and birds closer to historical levels, since migratory songbirds feed their babies moth and butterfly caterpillars.
Conservation Efforts and How to Help
Regional groups have begun building artificial habitat to replace the brick chimneys and hollow trees that swifts have lost. Wake Audubon constructed a dedicated swift research and roosting chimney tower surrounded by a native plant garden at the N.C. Museum of Natural Sciences' Prairie Ridge Ecostation in Raleigh, according to Wake Audubon. The Triangle Land Conservancy installed a 14-foot artificial swift tower at its 600-acre Brumley Forest Nature Preserve in Orange County to help replace roosting spots lost to modern chimney capping, per the Triangle Land Conservancy.
Those efforts matter in part because of federal law: under the Migratory Bird Treaty Act of 1918, chimney swifts, their active nests and their eggs are federally protected, making it illegal for property owners or chimney sweeps to disturb roosts, remove birds or cap chimneys while swifts are present, according to the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service. Hoodline previously covered similar protections and shifting roost sites affecting Vaux's swifts in Portland.
The News & Observer's reporting, by Tammy Grubb, also notes several simple steps people can take to support birds locally: keeping cats indoors, planting native trees and shrubs, turning off unnecessary outdoor lights at night — especially between 11 p.m. and dawn — skipping pesticides and mosquito sprays when possible, and letting leaves rot on the ground rather than raking them away. All of the Triangle watch parties are free to attend. Chimney swifts will keep moving through the region through the end of November before migrating to the Amazon and Peru for the winter, and the swirling flocks over Chapel Hill and Durham at dusk, whether diving into the ancient Davie Poplar or a downtown chimney, are expected to keep drawing crowds of thousands until then.
