Chimney Swift Towers and Dovecotes

Pigeons are an interesting topic for me, because they are a funny combination of chickens and bees in that they can forage with minimal inputs like bees, but produce a lot of high nitrogen waste and meat (for those who eat meat) like chickens. But the thing that made me want to make a post was learning about dovecotes. For anyone who doesn't know these are basically tall houses designed for pigeons to live and poop in. So now, you can let the pigeons go loose, forage their food and then you can check back in on the dovecote and collect all the poop.

Now something tangentially related: chimney swifts are a species of bird native to eastern half (not coast, half) of the US. Historically these birds nest in snags with an open top, with one snag being able to hold a multitude of birds, however this changed when more houses began including chimneys in their construction. Thus, chimney swifts got their name by nesting in people's chimneys. However, human trends are shifting again and we are no longer using chimneys and blocking/dismantling old chimneys. This is leaving chimney swifts with little habitat, and most of the remaining habitat is concentrated in areas with lots of buildings (and chimneys).

So people have begun making artificial chimney swift habitat in tall towers, very similar to chimneys. Here are some websites to learn more:
Audubon
Wisconsin Chimney Swift Group
Willistown Conservation Trust

So if there were a way to collect the waste from one of these chimney swift towers, you would basically have a dovecote except you are also participating in chimney swift conservation, kinda cool!

Here are some thoughts I have, and I'd love to hear other people's thoughts as well!

1) Chimney swifts are not domesticated, so they probably wouldn't love a person showing up at random times, but they do migrate. So waste collection would have to happen sometime when they are away (ie during the winter/pre or post migration)

2) The tower would probably need to be far-ish away from your house for it to have any conservation value which makes it harder to routinely collect waste. Which supports the whole collect seasonally idea.

3) Dovecotes tend to have solid floors which I think allows for someone to get in there and collect waste, which differs from most of the chimney swift tower designs I've seen which are elevated off the ground (I think to let swifts fly out the bottom). I've seen a handful of dovecotes elevated off the ground, but I am unsure if this has advantages/disadvantages.

Many historical houses around me in the South once had, or still possess,  remarkable dovecotes.  Our friend up in the mountains of North Carolina has one that's in good repair but has been dormant for decades, at last count they used it as a grand poopless bike shed/garage.  

They weren't all wooden structures though. In Louisiana the handmade brick was often king, as seen here in a 1930s photo... and to imagine, city dwellers of today only equate this bird with urban dive bombers releasing untimely missiles onto unsuspecting shoulders

I found this cool pdf booklet that describes in quite a bit of detail how to build a Swift tower and some important considerations. Notably here's a fun line:

In the fall, after the Chimney Swifts are no longer using the tower, the bottom should be cleaned of droppings, eggshells, and other material. Ideally, the nest from each season should also be removed before the swifts return.

Seems like this comes from a couple who have been doing research on these guys for quite a while, so this seems like a pretty foolproof way to make this work. And this isn't to say that you could get as much or as high quality of waste from a chimney swift tower as you could a dovecote, but it's also significantly less input, and possibly 50+ birds for one tower. The booklet even describes setting up multiple towers as a way to promote more nesting pairs, which could also increase the amount of waste you collect.

In any case, seems like a good way to attract bug-eating birds while getting a second yield!

For folks interested in pigeons and dovecotes here are some threads:

https://permies.com/t/67723/quail-pigeons/Pigeon-towers-dovecotes

https://permies.com/t/52837/Wattle-daub-dove-cote