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The February full moon is approaching, and Whip-poor-wills are inching northward. When I last wrote, they were reported as far north as Tallahassee. Over the past few weeks, there have been a few reports of Whip-poor-wills in southern Georgia. Day by day, winter hands us just a little more of spring.
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In this email
- The Last Whip-poor-will: Nostalgia amid species decline
- Waiting for Whip-poor-wills: My new audio essay
- Upcoming talks & more
The Last Whip-poor-will: Nostalgia amid species decline
I’ve been trying to keep good time by the seasons. For the past several months, I've made the slowest of progress on a chapter on the “emotional landscape” of Whip-poor-wills. Happily, that work came to a close last weekend. While the chapter isn't truly done, a full draft is. And now, over this final month of winter, I can take some new writing with me into spring!
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While this isn't the book's concluding chapter, it is the culminating one (at least to me). Linking species decline to our ever-growing sense that we and the earth are withdrawing from each other, "The Last Whip-poor-will," as I've tentatively titled the chapter, addresses the complex mix of emotions people feel about the song of Whip-poor-wills. Nostalgia is at the center of it all. As Whip-poor-wills disappeared from the American landscape, nostalgia found us. Poets, country musicians, and ordinary Americans began missing Whip-poor-wills, the bird whose song once meant so much to us.
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The nineteenth century gave us the first wave of nostalgic writing about Whip-poor-wills. By the standards of the time, Eugene Fields’ poem “Old Times, Old Friends, Old Love” went viral, appearing in newspapers, magazines, and collections of popular poems. It is not my favorite from this period; Fields invokes a too-perfect past for my liking. But clearly, it taps into a feeling that meant a lot to readers of its time. In their own loss of rural life, perhaps 19th-century Americans, too, missed Whip-poor-wills.
For all of its popularity a century ago, Fields’ poem is difficult to find today. So I posted it to my blog. You can read it here.
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Recent...
On February 7, Northeast Public Radio aired my audio essay "Waiting for Whip-poor-wills." You can read it or listen here or wherever you find your podcasts.
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and upcoming.
I have two upcoming virtual talks (free and open to the public) and a newly scheduled in-person one with Boulder Audubon.
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February 20 (7:00 PM MST) - Colorado Field Ornithologists. Register here.
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March 10 (7:00 PM EST) - Sarasota Audubon. More here.
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March 25 (7:15 PM) - Boulder Audubon. More here.
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What I'm Reading
To write "The Last Whip-poor-will," I dove into the psychology and sociology of nostalgia. One of my favorite pieces was a short essay, "Nostalgia, the Odors of Childhood and Society," written by the psychologist Alan R. Hirsch. The essay includes a list of nostalgic smells reported by 1,000 Americans who Hirsch surveyed in 1991. It's a fascinating list, at least in part because it reveals how nostalgic smells changed over the decade. People born before the 1950s generally described outdoor smells as nostalgic. The 1950s, suburbanization, and what we might call the synthesization of American life changed everything. Manufactured smells -- perfumes, cologne, crayon, Play-Doh, chlorine, hair spray, and the like -- replace flowers, grass, hay, burning leaves, even manure as nostalgic smells. Hirsch concludes the essay with a warning: "Society will certainly feel less urgency to preserve a natural environment that has lost its power to appeal to special nostalgic yearnings."
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Perhaps never before is it more important to live like a cliche in the most literal of ways: "Stop and smell the roses." Or introduce "smellwalks" to our daily practices.
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"To sleep where you may hear the whip-poor-will in your dreams!" - Henry David Thoreau, 1851
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lonesomewhippoorwill.com
jared@lonesomewhippoorwill.com
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