Latest in a series of posts on the Swifts
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When Jennie Gilrain saw the massive flock of birds, spinning like a dark tornado over her South Side neighborhood, she made it her mission to track them.
A member of the Lehigh Valley Audubon Society, Gilrain and her husband, Mark McKenna, found the birds at the former Bethlehem Masonic Lodge on Wyandotte Street, where she observed them coming and going from the building’s 95-year-old chimney like plumes of swirling smoke.
That was two years ago, and it was the first time Gilrain had seen chimney swifts, a small gray bird named for its favorite urban roost: tall hollow structures like chimneys and smokestacks.
“They are like aerial acrobats. They court in the air and the male will fly in tandem with the female. They swoop together, and when they go into the chimney, it’s the most spectacular sight,” Gilrain said.
The birds have plenty of options in Bethlehem, once an industrial hub with older buildings and former factories. But Gilrain knew this particular building was slated for demolition. When chain-link construction fences went up around the Masonic Lodge and neighboring Wilbur Mansion last month, she asked developer John Noble to reconsider his plans.
“He called me and I just told him about the birds. I was a little scared because I had my own prejudices about developers. I thought he might try to get rid of the birds,” Gilrain said.
Instead, Noble wanted to see the birds’ habitat preserved.
In the past week, Noble and his team have slowed their demolition, taking care to keep the 45-foot-tall chimney intact even as they remove the building it’s attached to.
“More than likely if we were to demo it at a normal pace, the chimney would already be down,” Noble said. “The guys doing the demo are really talented, and it’s made life more interesting for them. They don’t normally tear down a building and leave a staircase or chimney.”
Noble said he was compelled to help after learning about the birds and seeing a video of their aerial acrobatics. Like Gilrain and McKenna, what he saw inspired him to act.
“I’ve got to do something to make sure these birds are impacted in the least amount possible,” he said.
The chimney swifts spend their winters in Brazil, but in April they return to North America to lay eggs. Gilrain would expect no more than five pairs to nest in the chimney this spring since they are territorial during that time.
It’s from August to October, when the birds are migrating back to South America, that they put on a spectacular aerial show, with huge flocks stopping at known roosts along the way. Gilrain counted 2,200 birds coming from the Masonic Lodge’s chimney last year.
The demolition of the building is expected to take another five to six weeks. If for some reason the chimney can’t be saved, Noble plans to construct another one, about 60 feet from the original.
Noble says his redevelopment of the 4-acre property will transform the city’s gateway at the Hill-to-Hill Bridge, with an upscale hotel, apartment complex and new restaurant.
His plans involve tearing down the Masonic Lodge to build an addition to the former Wilbur Mansion at 623 Cherokee St., expanding it to house nine hotel rooms, a 120-seat conference center and 90-seat restaurant and bar. Noble is also planning 50 one- and two-bedroom apartments with a lobby and lounge, exercise room, mail room, storage units and rooftop terrace with fire pits.
It’s not yet clear how much it will cost to preserve the lodge’s chimney.
The Lehigh Valley Audubon Society started a GoFundMe page to raise $50,000 for the preservation. The group hopes some of the money from the “Save Our Swifts” campaign can go toward educating the public about the birds.
“Potentially tens and thousands of birds use this chimney as a secure roosting site at night and without it, they end up on the sides of buildings and trees in the area. And if you have a cold raining night, they can succumb,” said Peter Saenger, Lehigh Valley Audubon Society president.
It’s more critical than ever that the public understands the birds’ importance and their impact on the environment, said Saenger, a biology professor at the Acopian Center for Ornithology at Muhlenberg College.
Some of the factors contributing to their demise include habitat loss, domestic cats and window collisions as more buildings go up, Saenger said. People should be concerned because birds help make our environment more comfortable by removing thousands of pests every day.
A single swift can eat up to 2,000 insects a day, he said.
It’s unclear how many swifts call the Lehigh Valley home because they roost in hard-to-access areas, but it’s safe to say tens of thousands make their way through the area during their fall migration, said Scott Burnet, a member of the Lehigh Valley Audubon Society.
As more buildings are torn down and chimneys capped, Burnet has taken to making “towers” for the birds. He’s built 19 throughout the region, including one in his Allentown yard.
He and other members of the Audubon Society hope to raise enough money for an official count of the population and educational efforts. Gilrain has applied for a grant from the Lehigh Valley Engaged Humanities Consortium to organize public forums with the Audubon Society and Bethlehem Public Library.
“It’s so fascinating to me these birds have adapted to an urban environment. Originally they rooted in old-growth forests and hollowed out trees,” Gilrain said. “Now that the old-growth forests are almost completely gone, they have adapted. It’s almost like the swifts have grown up with our city.”
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Click here for the GoFundMe page
Latest in a series of posts on the Swifts 
Listen to Jennie Gilrain
because it’s two blocks away from me and I’ve actually seen the birds go in it . . . But I feel . . . well I not only feel, but I think . . . that this is an opportunity . . . that John [Noble] and his family and all of us . . . can set a precedent for a city . . . cooperating together . . . a developer . . . environmentalists . . . ecologists . . . civic-minded people . . . cooperating to save a threatened or vulnerable species . . . that hasn’t adapted to an urban environment . . . so even beyond saving the species we can model embracing the wild in an urban environment . . . and . . . this is for the ears of city government . . . I don’t know if there’s such a thing as . . . a city adopting a bird . . . You know, I know they have state birds . . . but do they have city birds . . . could we claim that the Swift is Bethlehem’s bird . . . and then really care for that bird . . . and enjoy it . . . and make it an attraction . . . and make it a tourist attraction . . . just like the Bethlehem Star [delightful Jennie-giggle] . . . So I really feel that this particular chimney is important . . . crucial . . . but it could be the beginning of a citywide . . . and then a countrywide . . . a national, even . . . precedent . . . example.”
chimneys . . . and now we’re capping them . . . and modern construction doesn’t have chimneys . . . So they’re habitat is going away . . . So every single spot is critical for them . . . especially migratory spots . . . for populations that still have nesting sites up in the north in the mature forests . . . I don’t know a lot about the Masonic Temple chimney . . . but during migratory seasons, spring and fall these birds gather in huge numbers . . . apparently this chimney houses 2000 birds at a time . . . and it’s critical that they have these roosting sites during migration . . . So these places are going away very quickly . . . So every one that we can replace or maintain is critical for their continued existence . . . These birds migrate from North America, Canada, all the way down to the Brazilian rain forest for the winter . . . and they come back . . . and they are very site-specific . . . so if they lose a tower, they have no place to go . . . and I would gather a good percentage would perish if they don’t have the same place to go back to . . . This is a worthy cause.”
has eagerly followed the changing plans for the site since then through stories in the local media. John last appeared here in the blog last February, just before the pandemic slowed things down. He is now breaking ground for a development that combines apartment living with hotel, restaurant, and event space.
some point these birds really high in the sky . . . and I couldn’t figure out what they were . . . sort of looked like barn swallows . . . maybe bats . . . They flew in such an amazing pattern . . . almost like they were playing with each other in the air . . . in pairs, in trios . . . I figured out finally that they were chimney swifts . . . My husband Mark and I went on a walk every night one summer to figure out where they were roosting . . . and one day we were walking across the bridge to go to the north side, and we noticed this swarm of birds going into the Masonic Temple chimney . . . and then we started to visit the chimney frequently to watch them go in . . . and this summer I started inviting . . . groups of people to the parking lot at the Masonic
