Dr. Dog’s singer, Scott McMicken, wasn’t the first to fantasize about shooting a Whip-poor-will. In 1907, the Washington Times published a story about a man who tried shooting a Whip-poor-will that kept him awake. The story itself seems farcical, and the Times of 1907 seems a mix of news, rumor, gossip, and maybe invented stories?
WINSTED, Conn July 5
“Whip-poor-will – whip-poor-will.”
Before daybreak a bird’s notes awoke Louis Reutler, who had sought rest at Lake Wonksunfuouk, a few miles from here. Reutler became peevish, got his shotgun and fired at the whip-poor-will, perched on a tree outside his bedroom.
Routler, until recently proprietor of the Beardsley House, was nearly asleep when—
“Whip-poor-will, whip-poor-will.”
Quite angry, Reutler shot at the bird again. The third time he fired the whip-poor-will flew to him, alighted on his gun barrel and sang sweetly:
“Whip-poor-will.”
Reutler went to the lake and plunged in to cool himself off.
Fake News?
Details around this story are difficult to confirm. (Obviously, the story itself is impossible to confirm.) There is a Louis Reutler buried in Indiana, where the Beardsley House is. Reutler’s life spans the time period in which this story happens. There is a town in Connecticut called Winsted. There doesn’t appear to be a lake called “Lake Wonksunfuouk” in CT these days, and there are no records of it in Google Books.
No matter the details, the story, perhaps, is a morality tale about man and nature. Read today, the casual violence toward animals stuns. But so, too, does the fact that the Times took for granted that the reader of this story would fully understand the details in question — what a Whip-poor-will is, that it sings its name, and that it sings incessantly at night.
Update
This story was also published in The Washington Post and the Cincinnati Enquirer on July 5, 1907. I’m not at all sure what to make of this.
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