By RICK STEELHAMMER
Charleston Gazette-Mail
SHEPERDSTOWN, W.Va. — Santa Claus isn’t the only creature with an appreciation for nice, roomy chimneys that aren’t venting hot, toxic fumes.
For the past five years, during August and September, the 60-foot-tall brick chimney at Shepherd University’s Sara Cree Hall has been used as an overnight lodge for groups of up to 1,500 southbound chimney swifts making their way from the northeastern United States to their annual over-wintering grounds in the lush, insect-rich lowlands of eastern Peru.
While traveling chimney swifts may miss their former roost stop, its demolition doesn’t mean migrating swarms of the curve-winged birds with cigar-shaped torsos will no longer have a place to stay in Shepherdstown.
Last month, the university removed a cap placed five years ago atop a large chimney that had once hosted swifts at nearby Knutti Hall. Shortly after that chimney was made inaccessible to birds, arrivals immediately began checking out alternative accommodations at Sara Cree Hall’s unused smokestack, which they found to their liking.
Last month, Shepherd and the Potomac Valley Audubon Society hosted a well-attended public meeting to plan alternative roosting sites for the birds on the Shepherd campus.
“Monitoring data from previous years reveal that around 1,000 individuals used the Knutti chimney,” said Bridget Tinsley, land and watershed program manager for the Potomac Valley Audubon Society.
To complement the reopening of the Knutti chimney to traveling swifts next year, “the PVAS intends to build a roosting structure in 2017,” Tinsley said.
Faux chimneys and roosting towers have been built and used with varying degrees of success throughout the chimney swifts’ range in recent years, to mitigate for lost habitat.
“Before the Industrial Age and the massive colonization of the Americas, chimney swifts would have been able to find roosts and nest sites in the old growth forests, in large trees and dead, hollow trees,” said Sher L. Hendrickson, an assistant biology professor at Shepherd. “Once logging and land development began, we lost those forests and no longer have that habitat available. The ability of these birds, which have very small feet and legs, to cling to the brick, made an opportunistic substitute for our destruction of their optimal habitat. Now, as our chimneys are being replaced by more modern structures, these opportunities are being lost as well, and protection becomes important.”
The university offered to make the bricks used in the Sara Cree Hall chimney available for use in an artificial roosting structure, but “with more thought, it was realized a brick structure might not be possible,” Hendrickson said, due to the height and size of the chimney, the need for structural support and the cost of such a project.
Also helping to plan new habitat for chimney swifts migrating through Shepherdstown are scientists from the West Virginia Division of Natural Resources, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service’s training center in nearby Leetown.
The dark-gray birds spend most of their lives airborne, eating insects, drinking water, even bathing while on the fly.
Bathing is accomplished by flying low over a pond or stream and smacking its surface to splash droplets of water onto their feathers, while drinking water is scooped up in their beaks and swallowed while on the move.
When chimney swifts do stop to rest, they cannot sit on perches like other birds. While their legs and feet are small, they have long claws suitable for clinging to the inner walls of chimneys or other vertical surfaces.
When migrating, as many as 10,000 chimney swifts may gather in a flock and circle a chimney in a funnel-shaped swarm before diving into the structure to roost for the night, according to the Cornell Lab of Ornithology.
According to the North American Breeding Bird Survey, the chimney swift population declined at an average rate of 2.5 percent per year between 1966 and 2015, creating a cumulative decline of 72 percent.
Sara Cree Hall is one of only two large roost sites known to exist in West Virginia, according to Hendrickson.
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