Wayward Birds Bring Big Mess to Area Houses : Migration: Startled residents are recovering from sparrow-sized intruders that swooped down chimneys and into some neighborhoods.

When Michael Wallace, bird curator at the Los Angeles Zoo, heard Thursday that hundreds of birds had swooped down a chimney and swarmed through a Glendale house, he was skeptical.

“It sounded too bizarre to me,” Wallace said.

But after visiting the two-story house on Cortez Drive, he realized that the rare winged invasion had indeed occurred. Thick chimney soot soiled the living room furnishings and excrement stained the walls. The last few sparrow-sized intruders were still inside, where they shocked and astonished a resident as they poured in, fluttering above him and hurtling into walls.

“It was a case of the birds making a mistake, taking a wrong turn and ending up in a situation they really didn’t want to be in,” he said Friday.

Similar bird invasions were reported this week in downtown Los Angeles, Oxnard and Hacienda Heights.

The mischief-makers were Vaux’s swifts, a cousin to the East Coast chimney swifts. Wallace said they were simply looking for a protected nighttime resting place during their spring migration from Central America to the Pacific Northwest. They probably saw the chimney as a type of hollow tree, becoming disoriented when they emerged from the fireplace inside the house, frightening the Sarnoff family.

“When I hear a bird chirp now, my first inclination is to duck,” Visma Sarnoff said Friday. Sarnoff said her family had to move to a hotel while she got the house cleaned and talked to her insurance company. “They’ve never had a claim like this,” she said. “There’s bird excrement all over everything. There were birds in my bed and in the closets.”

Her son, David, 11, was the first to encounter the birds as he did his homework Wednesday evening. “I didn’t know what was going on at first,” he said. “Hundreds of birds were swooping at me. I freaked out and ran to a neighbor’s house.”

The flock has since continued its migration, minus about a dozen birds killed flying into windows and walls inside the Sarnoff house.

Los Angeles-area authorities said misguided swifts also created havoc at houses in Hacienda Heights and Oxnard this week. A spokesman for a downtown high-rise, the Broadway Trade Center, also complained that a huge flock of migrating swifts had begun roosting on its rooftop. A bird expert said they were attracted to the chimney-like ventilation shafts atop the structure.

Los Angeles County animal control officers from Baldwin Park helped carry hundreds of swifts out of the Glendale and Hacienda Heights houses by hand Wednesday night. Judy Orosco, supervisor of the shelter and a 14-year veteran of the department, said she had never encountered home invasions by so many birds.

“It’s really strange to have it not happen at all, then to have it happen twice in one night,” Orosco said.

A television report on the Glendale incident featured scenes from Alfred Hitchcock’s horror classic “The Birds,” in which swarms of feathered creatures began attacking humans. But zoo curator Wallace said this week’s intruding swifts were not on the warpath.

“These birds do not even try to bite,” Wallace said. “They’re very docile. They’re insect-eaters. They don’t even have the equipment to bite a human.”

Jim Braden said he had little trouble removing the swifts that flew into his Oxnard house earlier this week. “We caught them real easy and then just carried them outside,” Braden said. “It’s awfully strange. The only time I’d seen anything like this was on National Geographic shows.”

Braden installed a screen in his fireplace to keep other birds from getting in, a precaution that bird experts recommend to people whose chimneys become a regular roosting place.

Although a bird swarm inside a house is a rarity, Kimball Garrett, an ornithologist at the county’s Museum of Natural History, said a few such incidents occur each spring during the height of the migratory season. “You can kind of set your calendar by it,” he said.

Garrett said migrating swifts seek shelter at dusk. In the wild, they roost in a cave or a hollow tree. In urban areas, he said, “Chimneys serve as an excellent substitute.”

Times staff writer Jim Herron Zamora contributed to this report.