The Vanishing Whippoorwill

Probably not one person in a thousand has ever seen a whippoorwill. Its melancholy song is one of the most familiar chords in the symphony of the summer evening but to the majority of listeners it is only a disembodied voice in the dark. The singer has come about as near to achieving invisibility as any living creature.

The whippoorwill is a migrant bird, spending its winters in Florida and its summers from March to October in the north. It travels entirely at night, sometimes in large flocks. It builds no nest but lays its flecked eggs on the ground depending on the flickering shadows of the woodland over the background of dried leaves to conceal them.

The bird is masterfully camouflaged by nature and usually selects a spot for its eggs where the woodland floor is free of underbrush and the trees are spaced far enough apart to cast an uneven shade. The male presumably sleeps all day while the female sits on the eggs or broods the newly hatched young, but at night he stands guard, may take his turn on the nest, and hunts insects for his mate.

The chick, almost exactly the color of the dead leaves among which it lies, remains essentially invisible. Nests are found only by accident.

Whippoorwills live almost exclusively on night-flying insects, especially moths and mosquitoes. They have been recorded, however, as sometimes hunting for worms, beetles and ants under bark, or on the ground.

The bird makes no particular effort to conceal itself from humans. Apparently it does not regard them as dangerous. There are cases where it actually has lit on the head of a man standing motionless in the dark. The female has been observed to fly about carrying her young between her thighs. She also, it has been reported, sometimes carries them in her bill, but there is no satisfactory evidence of this.

The whippoorwill is fond of taking dust baths. Sometimes one is caught by the lights of an approaching auto as it dusts itself in the middle of a country road.

The bird is remarkable for the regularity of its song and for the number of times the melancholy refrain is repeated without a pause. From 150 to 200 is not unusual. The naturalist John Burroughs claimed once to have counted 1058 such repetitions. The song is continuous from dusk until about 9:30 and from about 2 until dawn. It is heard rarely in the intervening hours.

The whippoorwill, it is pointed out in a Smithsonian report, has come to depend almost exclusively on darkness for its protection. For this reason it has suffered little, as have many other birds, with the cutting away of the forests and the advances of cities. Its enemies in the dark are some hawks, owls and foxes, but has exceptional powers of flight which often enable it to escape even when discovered.

The birds linger in the north only until the first killing frosts which destroy or drive into shelter the insects on which they feed. Then they start their night migrations southward which sometimes carry them as far as Central America.