Plight of the Swifts

Plight of the Swifts
Copyright Susan Brubaker Knapp 2026
51" square

 

Materials: Cotton, silk and linen fabric, fusible interfacing, fusible web, wool batting, cotton backing. Hand embroidered, free-motion quilted. 

I’ve been working on this piece for months, and it is one of the most labor-intensive pieces I've ever made. I started by ironing pieces of fabric from my scrap basket onto a light-weight fusible interfacing, and then machine stitching them down. Then I cut out hundreds of birds from different black fabrics backed with fusible web, and lots of circles and dots, and ironed them down and machine stitched each one to the background. Then I spent more than a month, hundreds of hours, hand embroidering the background with perle cotton. 

Then I free-motion machine stitched the background, going around the birds and circles, and around each stitch of hand embroidery. This quilt is larger and heavier than most of my work because of all the different fabrics and the embroidery, and I was very thankful to have my BERNINA Q16 with its extended table to support the weight and bulk while I quilted.  

When observing the natural world, I often wonder if earth would have been better off without humans. After America destroyed much of its old growth forests, Swifts started roosting in chimneys. Now, many chimneys have narrow flues and caps, and Chimney Swifts (Chaetura pelagica) have lost even more of their homes. Populations have declined by 50% in the last 50 years. 

These birds spend almost all of their lives airborne. When they land, these graceful smudge-gray birds are unable to perch; they cling to the vertical walls inside hollow trees, caves and chimneys. During migration, thousands of swifts roost together. I’ve been lucky enough to witness them flying at dusk, then funneling like a tornado into the hollow trunk of the historic Davie Poplar on the campus of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

Migration is a process common in the natural world, affecting many animal species, including homo sapiens – human beings. Like the swifts, human beings go where the conditions are better for them to live, make homes, and raise their young. 

While making this piece, I thought a lot about the political turmoil over human migration that has been so divisive in the world, and in the United States' politics, for decades. Even more so this year, with the Trump administration’s cruel policies of arrest, detention and deportation that have brought such anguish, pain and destruction to our country. 

On Feb. 2, 2025, Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem sought to terminate Haiti’s Temporary Protected Status (TPS) designation, but was temporarily halted by a judge's orders. On Dec. 1, 2025, Noem posted: “I just met with the President. I am recommending a full travel ban on every damn country that’s been flooding our nation with killers, leeches, and entitlement junkies. Our forefathers built this nation on blood, sweat, and the unyielding love of freedom—not for foreign invaders to slaughter our heroes, suck dry our hard-earned tax dollars, or snatch the benefits owed to AMERICANS. WE DON’T WANT THEM. NOT ONE.”

Such unbelievable anger, hatred, and misunderstanding. 

Migration is an-old process. How is it that we have learned so little about how to accommodate it – how to welcome and celebrate it – how to make it work for all of us so that we can to live together in harmony? It is a tragedy… for the Swifts, and for humans.