Chapman Elementary School

I’ve not been for a couple of years and told a friend who just moved here about this. I told her how everyone does picnics and kids play and it is a great time.
Wow… everyone and their cousin comes to this now. It is packed! And we brought beer, and, fortunately when parks people started telling people to take their wine off campus (which looked like it was paired with some tasty cheese!) I hid my single bottle of beer under my kilt. Go ahead and look if you want.
Still, it was fun to watch.

Chapman Elementary School is where the swifts go into the chimney during a small part of the year. Although this seemed only like an exercise in looking at a bunch of boring birds in an overhyped event, it was actually quite fun once I accompanied a relative who wanted to attend.
You bring a blanket and, or chairs and get ready to watch. There’s some live music and the hill provides for lots of space, although it does get crowded. Since this is a park hosting a popular event, you will see a lot of children that scream and run around, but that’s normal for events like this.
At around 7PM, I saw the swifts fly around. They fly around in all kinds of unique patterns and it varies. After awhile, they whirl around like a tornado and crowds chear them on.
This is right in the middle of Wallace Park, that’s near Montgomery Park and the Alphabet District. The raw energy and beauty was also a draw for the swifts event.
The swifts provide a decent show.

High drama! Swifts make psychedelic patterns in the sky for about an hour and then descend into the chimney. Oh wait!!! It’s our villain the majestic Hawk. Bam! Majestic Hawk just dive bombed a swift and carried it off into the night to feast on it’s flesh. Twist open your water bottle and take a swig of your booze. Maybe order a pizza and bring it with. Try to block out the hoards of screaming kids ineffectively sliding down the hill on cardboard. People watching is almost as good as watching the birds. After the swift show watch all the people try to leave the neighborhood in their cars or bikes. The swifts do it better and faster than us, that’s for sure.

For the money, they could have built a faux old tree at the edge of the nearby more-​forested area. If you’re feeling good about the birds, remember that this was done so people could continue to watch the birds. Everyone has to drive there in their SUVs, of course, and then complain about parking. The whole spectacle is like a macabre celebration of the end of nature.

Great, unless you have an asthmatic child going to Chapman. Then the bird thing really sucks. They can’t turn on the heater so the whole school is freezing and my daughter came home each day wheezing. She also had a hard time studying while in school because she was so cold and hard to sleep at night because of she had a hard time breathing all made much worse by the lack of heat. No, they didn’t bring in space heaters.
She helped build the mosaic’s out front so I do enjoy those but i would much rather they turn on the heat and let the birds go elsewhere.
I’m sure there have been many other children with health problems whose parents felt the same way.

Nope, the month of September did not bring the onset of little limbs dutifully trudging from our home to the schoolyard. We live on the east side, anyway — the kids would have to be pretty directionally-​challenged in order to find themselves in Northwest Portland and at Chapman Elementary. And there are no kids because COME ON.
Kids would really drag down the proceedings of popping open a bottle of wine (white because it’s still warm out, damnit), eating a sandwich, sprawling out on the grass, and bearing witness to the spectacle of thousands of Vaux’s swifts making their nightly rounds before settling into the Chapman School chimney.
Except rounds is kind of misleading. The swifts spread across the sky in formations that make no sense to a cat lover like me. Sometimes they stream out in a blanket that chokes the whole expanse of dimming blue, then pink, then purple, then black. Then they arrange themselves in a tight, whirling cone directly above the chimney, as if they’re trying to siphon something from it. The swifts circle around and around the chimney, like they’re still sizing it up before agreeing to roost inside, despite how they’ve made the same negotiation every September for the last 14 years. And yet so many more race out of the ether to join in the dance. Are birds just natural military brats? How do they all fall into the same rank and file and still accommodate everyone (mostly) with a place to perch for the evening?
Maybe sometime in the future, I will bring human kids to take part in the tradition. They’ll slide down the hill on cardboard, eat all my snacks, make me feel like a terrible person for taking swigs from my water bottle full of pinot gris as they play and grow too quickly, and they’ll barely notice the blanket of birds doing something inexplicable over their heads until a hungry hawk tries to hone in on the action. And I’ll hardly remember a time when it was just me, some friends, and a vast and blank sky of future ahead of us all.
Good night, summertime.

The Chapman Swifts are a magical wildlife migration. It’s like the great Serengeti wildebeest migration, the migration of monarchs, of Mediterranean tuna, salmon returning home. Heroic and inspirational.
These small birds stop for a few weeks in September traveling through Portland. Because their traditional nesting places of hollow trees in virgin forests have disappeared, they have found new nesting spaces in our industrial society. Here they nest in the chimney of an old elementary school adjacent to a park. People come while it’s light, picnic and watch the birds circle, eventually forming a spiral funnel into the chimney, as twilight falls, to sleep for night. Occasionally a hawk will circle, preying on perceived outliers, to the boos or cheers of the crowd. Stop by the Chapman Swifts phenomena, with a blanket and a picnic. Arrive about one hour before sunset.
Nature’s beauty!

Watching the Vaux’s Swifts is one of the most exciting and beautiful things I have seen. Pack a picnic and bottle of wine and head over to the school before sunset. Watch the birds gather to form a tornado shape as they spiral and swoop into the school’s chimney. This is a beautiful site and it’s refreshing to see so many people interested in this natural phenomenon. COMING SOON! Oct 2, 2008. Cinema 21. The Chapman Swift phenomenon is celebrated in the documentary, On The Wing, by the city’s own Real Earl Productions. The film debuts as a benefit for The Audubon Society of Portland.

Chapman Elementary School is more than just a Portland Public Schools neighborhood elementary school. It also doubles as a temporary home for migrating vaux swifts for about three weeks in each September.
Each year, thousands of migrating vaux swifts claim Chapman’s old boiler chimney as an evening resting place. During their short stay in Portland, crowds gather around the school at dawn and dusk to watch a black cloud of birds swoop, flutter and funnel into the chimney in graceful frenzy. It’s truly a sight to be seen.
The presence of lingering predatory hawks who see the swifts as dinner only adds to the excitement.
Don’t miss this natural wonder come September.