It was just another damp foggy morning here at Storyteller Central. I was sitting here at my neat but not overly ostentatious desk – OK, it’s really a disaster area and now that I think about it, my desk is a tad too ostentatious around the edges for some – sipping my Folger’s Breakfast Blend when I came across a newspaper article about something called “The 20012 Nationwide Chimney Swift Roost Monitoring Project.”?

Right now, I assume you’re probably a little shocked and thinking the same thoughts I had after reading that subversive-sounding title: Does the Homeland Security gang know about this project? And if not, why not?? Chimney Swift Roost Monitoring Project, indeed.?

According to the article, which carried a Bethel dateline, several hundred chimney swifts were spotted entering a large chimney to roost recently at Gould Academy’s Bingham Hall.? A likely story. ?About 25 volunteers claimed they joined a Bethel naturalist to count the birds for the 2012 nationwide Chimney Swift Roost Monitoring Project.?

I can hear some of the more naive among you saying, “It all sounds pretty innocent to me. What’s wrong with monitoring the roosting activity of chimney swifts?”?

Can’t you see? That’s the genius of it. The whole thing sounds so wholesome, like everything else the folks up in Bethel do. But we can’t be too careful in these troubled times, can we?

?“We counted roughly 500 birds entering the chimney, so it looks like they are massing for migration,” the counter said. “We plan to go regularly to watch the numbers and pattern of entering, and their last day here.”?

Bethel residents believe the birds, which have doubled in numbers in the last few days, are to begin migrating en masse by the last week in August.?

“We will be tracking it over the next several days,” the spokesman said.?

I wanted to think that the whole thing was as innocent as it sounded, but why is it part of a “nationwide network?” What’s this business about crossing borders? They’re unpatroled borders, most likely.? Who is responsible for putting this nationwide network together, supposedly for monitoring the roosting activities of migrating chimney swifts? And another thing: Why aren’t our security officials asking these questions??

If you’re like me, you have no idea what they’re talking about with the mention of chimney swifts, so I did a little research for both of us.? As a group, chimney swifts are highly specialized for high-speed aerial life. Uh huh.? They have long, saber-like wings that are either extended in flight or folded back when they kick back to relax or roost. They have been described as a “cigar with wings.”? Those who spend their lives studying, or “monitoring” these birds say some species are thought to sleep while flying in “aerial roosts,” and it is also believed that chimney swifts can copulate in flight.?

Innocent, you say?? It’s plain to me that these birds are hardly innocent.?

These same experts say large flocks of chimney swifts gather in the fall and roost in chimneys, sometimes by the hundreds or even thousands – even in places like Bethel.? They depart their breeding grounds in late August or September (like our summer complaints) to begin the long migration south.? Flying by day, they cross the Gulf of Mexico and travel through Central America to winter along the edges of tropical lowland forests in Amazonian Peru.? All very standard bird-like stuff, you say. But, again, why a nationwide network here in the U.S. just to monitor their “roosting?”?

A Bethel resident said the birds spend nearly all of their time flying, except when they are at their nest or roosting for the night. That sounds pretty logical.? You could say you spend all your time driving your car except when you’re at home – “roosting” for the night.

“It’s quite interesting to think that they’ll all be gone from here in a few days,” said the Bethel resident.

Don’t you wish our summer complaints, I mean visitors, left as quietly and as quickly?

John McDonald is the author of five books on Maine. His latest, “John McDonald’s Maine Trivia: A User’s Guide to Useless Information,” is now in bookstores. Contact him at mainestoryteller@yahoo.com.

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