HUMBOLDT A recent Register article about an Iola building infested with bats netted Steve Barlow a phone call.
Barlow, a wildlife biologist who prescribed a remedy for the buildings owners erecting a nearby bat house was contacted a second time, this time from several Humboldt residents who thought bats were making themselves at home in Humboldt High Schools old boiler chimney.
So I came out one night to watch, Barlow recalled Monday afternoon.
Sure enough, around dusk, he saw scores of winged visitors zipping into the chimney but they werent bats.
Instead, Barlow identified the visitors as chimney swifts, small and agile migratory birds that will head to South America as cold weather arrives.
Until then, however, Barlow estimates the HHS chimney is serving as temporary quarters to a thousand or more swifts.
With that in mind, Barlow and Iolan Don Erbert were in Humboldt Monday to oversee construction of a chimney swift house on the west side of the high school.
Inside the 15-foot tower is inverted lap siding which serves as makeshift shelves for the small swifts, whose legs are too weak to hold their weight and grasp branches.
An access panel at the bottom of the tower will allow school officials to clean out the structure periodically.
Barlow has little doubt the chimney swifts will quickly adapt to their new quarters.
We might even have some check it out tonight, he said.
Then, after the small birds have headed south for the winter, school personnel will seal off the top of the old chimney, which hasnt been in use since the school replaced its boiler system with ground source heat pumps more than 10 years ago.
WHEN OUT in the wild, chimney swifts travel in large groups, darting about in an erratic style.
Their appearance was once described by naturalist Roger Tory Peterson as a cigar with wings.
