There’s a bird in my chimney. What do I do?
The short answer
If you are hearing chattering or a rolling, high-pitched twitter from the chimney in late spring or summer, nothing is trapped. You almost certainly have a family of chimney swifts, the parents are flying in and out all day, and the noise stops on its own in a few weeks.
Do not light a fire. Do not open the damper. Do not have the chimney swept or capped until they have gone.
What you are actually hearing
Chimney swifts nest inside masonry chimneys, and the sound people call in about is nestlings begging for food when a parent arrives. It is loud, it is mechanical-sounding, and it is easy to mistake for an animal in distress.
There is a second sound worth knowing: a hissing, rattling alarm call the young make when something disturbs them. If you bang on the flue or open the damper to look, that is what you will hear, and it is a sign to stop.
The noise is loudest in the last couple of weeks before the young leave, and then it ends. Total occupancy is roughly a month from hatching to departure. If it is genuinely unbearable, keeping the damper closed and packing the fireplace opening with insulation muffles it considerably.
The five things not to do
Never light a fire. We have seen birds with smoke inhalation and severe burns from people trying to smoke something out. For swifts it is worse — nestlings physically cannot leave.
Never open the damper during nesting season. The damper is the only thing between the flue and your living room. If yours is broken, foam rubber works as a temporary block.
Never have the chimney swept while a nest is active. Wait at least six weeks if there are eggs, four weeks if there are young. A sweep knocks the nest and the babies into the firebox.
Never try to remove or rescue them. Young swifts taken out of the chimney early starve slowly over several days — the parents cannot feed them anywhere else.
Never cap a chimney with birds inside. That seals them in.
One reassurance, because it is the thing people worry about: a swift nest is not a fire hazard and does not damage the chimney. It is a small half-saucer of twigs glued to the flue wall with the birds' own saliva. It is nothing like the mass of debris a raccoon or a squirrel builds.
Why they are in your chimney at all
Chimney swifts cannot perch. Their feet only cling to vertical surfaces, and their tail feathers end in stiff spines that prop them against a wall like a woodpecker. They originally nested in large hollow trees in old-growth forest.
When that forest came down, masonry chimneys turned out to be an almost perfect substitute, and the swift population followed the chimneys. Now that is reversing. Modern chimneys are metal-lined or too narrow to grip, old brick chimneys are being relined or torn down, and unused ones get capped.
Chimney swifts have declined about seventy-four percent since 1966. The 2025 State of the Birds report lists them as a Tipping Point species — a bird that has lost more than half its population in fifty years and is still falling.
So the situation is this: for about two months a year, your chimney is housing a species that has lost three quarters of its population largely because it ran out of chimneys. We would not normally editorialize, but that is a good trade for a few noisy weeks in July.
When you can sweep or cap
Swifts arrive in the continental US in late March and are gone by early November, wintering in the Amazon basin. Memphis is far enough south that they show up on the early end.
February through early March is the safe window here, before they return. After they leave in the fall works too. Treat April through August as absolutely off limits.
One important exception. Metal chimneys should be capped permanently, whenever they are empty, at any time of year. A swift cannot grip a smooth metal flue. It falls to the bottom and cannot climb out, and a metal chimney is a death trap rather than habitat. Masonry, brick and stone are the ones worth leaving open seasonally.
If you do want the birds gone permanently, cap it in late winter — not in July.
The legal part
Chimney swifts are protected under the Migratory Bird Treaty Act of 1918. A federal permit is required to remove the birds or their nest during nesting season.
This has a practical consequence people should know: sweeping or capping an occupied chimney during nesting season destroys an active nest with young in it, and that is a federal violation, not a gray area. A reputable chimney sweep will inspect first and decline the job until the birds are gone. If a contractor tells you it is fine to do it in June, get a different contractor.
A bird loose inside the house
Different problem, and easier than it looks. The main thing is not to chase it — most injuries happen when a panicked bird hits a window or a mirror.
Stop. It is not an emergency and nothing bad happens in the next ten minutes.
Close the interior doors so it cannot get deeper into the house.
Open one exterior door or window, and only one.
Turn off every light inside and close the curtains or blinds on all the other windows. The bird flies toward light — give it exactly one bright exit.
Leave the room. Most birds let themselves out within a few minutes once people stop moving.
If it is already dark outside, do not work at it at night. There is no bright exit to aim for. Shut the bird in a darkened room and open things up in the morning.
If you do have to catch it, hold a towel or sheet up to block it from flying further indoors rather than swatting at it. Then set a box on its side next to it and guide it in with a towel. Never drop a box down onto a bird from above.
For a large bird — a hawk, an owl, anything that will not cooperate — call for help instead.
A bird that has fallen into the fireplace
Set the room up first, before you open anything: interior doors closed, curtains drawn, one exterior door or window open, all the lights off. Then open the damper during daylight so the bird can drop into the firebox and head for the light.
For a young swift specifically, there is a better option. A feathered juvenile swift can usually be put back. Swifts cling to vertical surfaces, so a feathered youngster placed gently against the flue wall inside the fireplace will climb back up to its family. You can identify one by the chattering — they raise an alarm call or a begging call when approached.
A swift with few or no feathers cannot climb, and needs a rehabilitator.
When it needs a rehabilitator
It is covered in soot.
It is injured, bleeding, or cannot use a wing.
It is an unfeathered nestling.
It has been down there for days and is clearly exhausted.
A cat or dog got to it.
Soot is not a cosmetic problem, and this is worth explaining. Soot and creosote wreck the microstructure that makes feathers waterproof and insulating, so a sooty bird released outdoors is a hypothermia case in the next rain. Worse, it will preen obsessively to clean itself and swallow the creosote, which is toxic. And birds have an unusually efficient one-way respiratory system with very little reserve, so inhaled fine particulate does disproportionate damage compared to a mammal.
A sooty bird needs washing and clearance from a rehabilitator, not a shake-off and a release.
As always: no food, no water. Ventilated box, dark and quiet, and call.
Who we are
Out of the Woods Wildlife Rescue & Rehab is a wildlife rehabilitation nonprofit in Memphis, permitted by the Tennessee Wildlife Resources Agency. If you are hearing something in your chimney and want to know whether it is a problem, text 901-340-6534 with a recording if you can get one. Nine times out of ten the answer is that everything is fine and it will be over by August.
Sources: Cornell Lab of Ornithology, All About Birds and the North American Breeding Bird Survey. 2025 State of the Birds report. Maryland Department of Natural Resources. Driftwood Wildlife Association. Wildlife Center of Virginia. Wisconsin Humane Society. Columbus Audubon. Migratory Bird Treaty Act, 16 USC 703. US Fish and Wildlife Service nest removal guidance.
We are wildlife rehabilitators, not lawyers or veterinarians.