On Saturday, October 29th, we spent the day in St. George's Square (Guelph) running a public intervention for our SWIFT project. It was cold, but thankfully the rain held off all day. Shane Krepakevich of Musagetes and Claire Hunter joined our team to execute a large graphic composed of hundreds of stencilled chimney swifts emerging from the silhouette of a chimney that involved the public joining in as well. We talked about the plight of the endangered Chimney Swift and broader issues of displacement and change in the community, gave out take-away stencils, bookmarks, buttons and a limited edition set of narrative postcards. Our stencilling also spread out around the downtown and we are grateful to Wild Rose for selling our Ts and to The Bookshelf for displaying and distributing our postcards. We used tempra paint so the the images should last for a little while and slowly fade with rain and snow. Thanks to everyone who joined in and to the Musagetes for commissioning this initiative as part of 1mile2.

The Chimney Swift is endangered all over North America. Their original roosting/nesting habitat were large hollow dead trees and they were fortunate to find a substitute when such trees were cut down in the many industrial chimneys at factories and mills that popped up all around the continent during the late 18th and 19th centuries. Over recent decades, many of these chimneys have disappeared and the swift has not been as lucky to find another suitable alternative. But it is more than just the loss of chimneys that have impacted the swift (their numbers have declined by over 90%), urban sprawl, loss of fields and woodlands, changes to agricultural practice and the impacts of urban/industrial/agricultural pollution of water quality have also had a serious impact on them. The plight of the chimney swift is not unique and it is reminder of the challenges faced by all species (include people) when faced with repeated changes on a number of fronts.