Eastern Whip-poor-wills fill late spring and early summer nights with the sound of their song: a repetitive, rhythmic, chant-like call of “whip-poorwill.” Among America’s birds, this may be one of the best-known vocalizations. Certainly, it’s the most iconic. After all, what other bird has inspired centuries of poets, novelists, and songwriters to listen in wonder at the darkness?
But as with most things we think we know about other species, the story is more complex—and certainly more interesting—than it seems. Sure, Whip-poor-wills sound like they say their name. But as the recordings I’ve included below show, there are other sounds in there, if you’re close enough to a singing bird and know what to listen for.
Where Whip-poor-wills Still Sing
Until the week of the most recent full moon, my experiences with Eastern Whip-poor-wills (Antrostomus vociferus) were rather limited. I didn’t grow up with their chant echoing through the woods behind my home in the Hudson Valley of New York, though I those who lived there a generation or two before me probably knew the song well.
Instead, I heard Whip-poor-wills during return trips to New York to bird the area with a high school friend and my youngest brother. (I now live in Colorado, where Common Poorwills are and Whip-poor-wills aren’t.) These encounters were brief and distant, as I describe in my recent essay for Audubon. It was hard to hear in them what had made the song of Eastern Whip-poor-wills so iconic: its endless repetition, its echoing quality as birds answered each other, and the wildness of their calls under a full moon.
This spring, I decided I had to hear the birds again, so I can do the songs justice in the book I’m writing on the species. I wanted to know what made the icons an icon. So, with an invitation from wildlife scientists with the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, I traveled to the Ozarks of southern Missouri to spend the May full moon where Whip-poor-wills still sing.
Under a Full Moon with a Lunarphilic Species
One of the most important things to know about Whip-poor-wills is that they’re lunarphilic. This means that they sync much of their behavior – feeding, reproduction, migration, and, yes, their song — to the moon cycle.
Full moons are especially important. They provide good light for Whip-poor-wills to hunt flying insects. And they draw out great choruses of birds.
So it wasn’t by accident that I brought myself to Missouri for the May full moon. I didn’t just want to hear Whip-poor-wills, I wanted to hear them under the light that seems to define their existence.
The night didn’t disappoint. Though weather seemed to gloom the sky by day – and a few early evenings brought rain – the evenings cleared of clouds. The waxing moon shown on the woods, its moths, mammals, and its many (so, so many!) Whip-poor-wills.
As the moon intensified, so, too, did the song of Eastern Whip-poor-wills. They seemed to sing from everywhere: the trees closing in on the bunkhouse I stayed in, woods beyond those trees, even modest thickets on roadsides. Here is a video (which is really just an audio recording) of one of those modest thickets singing the night away.
The Classic Chant of the Eastern Whip-poor-will
When most people think of the song of a Whip-poor-will, they think of the three syllable, chant-like call heard in the video above: a discrete “whip” followed by the joint “poor-WILL,” with sharp emphasis on that third syllable. This is what a single, close bird sounds like, especially if he is repeating his song at the typical pace.
But is this what the song actually sounds like? Most of our field guides note nuances that the phrase “whip-poor-will” misses.
Of special note is that the middle syllable often sounds like two syllables. To Sibley, it’s “Whip puwiw WEEW.” To Pieplow, “whip-po-wa-will.” Even Thoreau, who didn’t have the benefit of audio recordings of the species, thought this, once naming the bird “Whip-or-I-will” in his journal.
The hidden note in Whip-poor-will
And there’s something else hidden in the song of the Eastern Whip-poor-will: a quiet (to our ears, at least) introductory “cluck.”
You need to be close to a Whip-poor-will to hear the introductory note. And you need to know what you’re listening for, because the cluck is quick and easy to mistake for the background noise of frogs, insects, and other unseen night beings.
In Missouri, I was lucky enough to stand close enough to a singing Whip-poor-will to hear this sound. It’s hard to hear in recordings, but it’s there. Here’s the best of my recordings. Between repetitions of the bird’s three syllable song, you can hear the gulp-like cluck.
I’ll admit to finding the classic song of the Whip-poor-will as eerie and weird as many 19th century writers found it. Perhaps I was primed for that experience, being familiar with both the longstanding lore and the horror fiction invoking the species.
Even so, there’s something ominous about a forest filling with this rhythmic chorus. This is especially so when distant birds answer one who is nearby. It felt threatening, as if the nearest bird is calling a veritable army of the night into existence. No wonder the worry and fear and lore we once projected onto Whip-poor-wills: the darkness once closed in on us with a demand to whip Will.
Yes, this is just a flight of fancy, the product of an imagination shaped by our collective uneasiness with night. But one can feel it still, if in the right place and the wrong state of mind, where Whip-poor-wills sing.
The Forest’s Groove
Whip-poor-wills are known for being monotonous, giving hundreds, if not thousands of repetitions of their song during the spring and summer. An oft-cited achievement – in singing and counting – is John Burroughs’ counting of one Whip-poor-will singing his name 1,088 times without a pause. Another 390 repetitions followed a brief break.
Vociferous, as the species’ scientific name recognizes, is the Whip-poor-will.
But a strange thing happens where Whip-poor-wills gather, especially under the pull of a full moon. They speed their songs. As they speed up, they seem to break the hypnotizing, monotonous effects of their choral chanting on us. In place of that…changing waves of driving beats.
Sometimes their rapid songs line up; the calls overlay; and a sort of joyful (to my ears) explosion of music fills the woods. Other times, the songs interrupt each other. It becomes incredibly difficult to hear the iconic name that we say the birds sing. One bird’s whip follows between another’s slurring of poor and will.
Eventually, the loud beat of the final syllable becomes the dominant sound. “Whip-poorwill” disappears into a cacophonies of syllables.
It is no longer eerie, strange, threatening. It is not lonely. It is not mournful.
No, it is now riotous, wild, driving. The forest—and perhaps the human, too—finds the Whip-poor-will’s groove.
To Describe Whip-poor-wills…
Audubon wrote that,
“Description is incapable of conveying to your mind any accurate idea of the notes of this bird, much less of the feelings which they excite”
I think it’s their speeding up, their sliding in and out of each other’s songs, and indeed the feelings these movements excite, that is most difficult to convey. My recordings can’t really capture the sonic effects of it, largely because my shotgun microphone is directional – recording what is in front of it and not the surrounding songs that interrupt it. And the feel of it all doesn’t show up on an audio recording.
But this is how it ought to be. After all, this is a bird we imagine more than we see.
Featured photo by flickr user budgora. Some rights reserved.
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