Common Nighthawk - The Lonesome Whip-poor-will

The Nighthawk’s Trajectory

What the trajectory of Common Nighthawks tells us about the suburban landscape.

I’m an agnostic in all things but nighthawks, for with the bullbat I hold this belief: one cannot pursue the bird directly; rather, one can only seek a trajectory that may someday cross theirs.

My faith in the bird was born amid their southward migration through Denver, Colorado, in September 2015. I’d gone looking for nighthawks in a place where and at a time when I thought it likely I might see one. Common Nighthawks are (mostly) crepuscular; they hunt for flying insects through dawn and dusk. Walking around central Denver’s Cheesman Park after sunset, eyes aimed upward, I found only brown bats. I sat a while, awaiting night, and watched these other things with wings. Then, I left.

In truth, I just readied to leave. I sat in my car and, though it was a Sunday and though it was evening, I compulsively checked my email. A (lengthy) message from my department chair at the University of Denver greeted me. Compulsively, I read it, though I believe one should neither mix time off with work nor birds with the same. Dusk gave way to night. The bats gave way to a still park.

At the end of the email, nighthawks.

A trio, emerging from the nearby neighborhood, furiously pursued insects under the park’s streetlights. I left my car and followed them. Nighthawks, like swallows, feed on the wing, catching insects as they fly. They are strong, agile fliers. I have seen them cut upward, leaning backward as they do, in pursuit of prey. They make micro-adjustments that give them a “tipsy” appearance, as Pete Dunne puts it in his Field Guide Companion. To me, they appear confident in the air. Untouchable, even. Nighthawks always seem to be beyond their human-observer, even when approaching them—a twist of angles always cutting away. Unlike songbirds, which rarely fly directly at people, this trio chased their prey wherever it went, even if it meant flying directly at me.

An arm’s length away, a nighthawk.

Photo credit: "Nighthawk at Dusk (Centennial, Colorado)" by Jared Del Rosso — Nighthawk at Dusk (Jared Del Rosso)

One can only seek a trajectory that may someday cross the trajectory of a nighthawk. I spent this past summer seeking just that. I let my dogs lead me. I indulged every detour and delay. We turned home when they wanted to. We inspected dead ends. We doubled back on trails. We lingered when the dogs wanted to linger. We sat together in fields and on curbs. I suppressed my better judgement of where and when the birds would appear. By maintaining the appearance of not seeking nighthawks, I hoped I could fool serendipity into delivering them.

I did so to try to document the bird’s presence in Centennial, a southern suburb of Denver, during the bird’s nesting season. A mid-June sighting gave me hope. My dogs and I sought the birds above a buggy marsh at a local open space. The setting sun inspired the complex chorus of catbirds, blackbirds, and sparrows. But I missed a simpler sound: the buzz of the bird I sought, the distinct, nasal “peent” of a nighthawk. As dusk deepened, my dogs decided it was time to head back to our car. (One dog is afraid of the dark and what it means in Colorado: wild canids. The other is simply not much for walking.) I obliged, though I wanted to keep seeking.

Nearer to the car, the dogs changed their minds, insisting I let them chase each other around me. Though leashed, the dogs sprinted circles. To keep myself from their tangle, I spun with them. Once, twice, then—and only because the dogs had chosen when to turn back and when to stop for play and when to turn me in the right direction—a nighthawk.

I seek the nighthawk’s trajectory because I measure the world by this bird. They arrive in Colorado late in spring migration, just as that season tips toward summer. They leave before autumn begins whispering of winter. But the bird isn’t just a sign of the seasons. Their presence speaks of the complexity of our climate, the non-human world, and the human/non-human nexus. Obligate feeders on flying insects, the Common Nighthawk’s steep population decline over the past half-century may relate to broader declines in their prey, owing to pesticide use, the warming planet, and other factors. Nighthawks are losing habitat, too. Some of that habitat is their wild habitat of grasslands and forests. But they’re also losing built habitats in urban and suburban environments. Nighthawks use the flat, gravel-covered roofs of many urban buildings as nesting sites. Unfortunately for the birds, most new development forgoes gravel for other materials, such as rubber. (Patches of gravel, installed on flat roofs, are a potential compromise that may support nesting nighthawks. New Hampshire’s “Project Nighthawk” is experimenting with this.)

The fate of Common Nighthawks is tethered to us, in ways that the fates of many non-human animals are. But it isn’t easy to observe our entangled destinies. Nighthawks are not like the chickadees that visit our feeders, the finches and phoebes that nest on nooks around our houses, the corvids that seem more at home around our homes than we do, or the hawks that hunt on our highways. Nighthawks nest on our skylines. They migrate at incredible heights, and the vast majority of these birds pass over our summer and fall activities without being noticed. By day, they disappear into trees, grasses, and rocks. Their cryptic feathering renders them invisible. If you’ve ever lucked into a sighting of a nighthawk on a tree, you know how easy it would be to overlook the bird. You also know that nighthawks don’t care that you’ve found them. Their faith in their camouflage, their use of difficult to access perches, and the fact that they have no need for daytime activity allows them to tolerate proximity to us.

Photo credit: "Perched Common Nighthawk (St. Paul, Minnesota)" by Jared Del Rosso — Perched Nighthawk along the Mississippi River (Jared Del Rosso)

Ultimately, my trajectory and the Common Nighthawk’s did not intersect during their nesting season. Perhaps this is a sign of the species’ decline or of my neighborhood’s hostility, with our grassy lawns and dependence on pesticides, to the birds and their prey. Perhaps it is only that I have not yet found our shared trajectory.

But I have learned something else from this effort. Pursue this uncommon bird, during the uncommon hours of dawn and dusk, and you will find the trajectory of other uncommon creatures. Those brown bats, one of which dropped me to my knees by hunting at the brim of my hat. A raccoon, ambling down a drainage ditch. A coyote, patrolling an undeveloped field. Fox kits, playfully hunting along a neighborhood path. Great Horned Owls, perched in suburban parking lots and cemeteries. A Mule Deer pair, cautiously watching the human animals who ride bikes, and toss baseballs, and walk dogs while seeking nighthawks in fields near riparian corridors.

This essay originally appeared on the Center for Humans & Nature’s blog.

Featured image by Kenneth Cole Schneider @ https://flic.kr/p/2j6PJNM

On Birds, ChatGPT is Stuck in the 18th-century.

Three hundred years ago, naturalists couldn’t tell the difference between two iconic species of birds. Today, ChatGPT is making the same mistakes.

I recently asked ChatGPT an easy question: “Why a Whip-poor-will is named a Whip-poor-will?” The popular chatbot muddled its way through an answer, making some of the same mistakes as 18th century naturalists. Not satisfied with its errors, ChatGPT introduced new ones!

Wilson “Discovers” the Whip-poor-will

In the first decades of the 1800s, the Scottish naturalist Alexander Wilson wrote his nine volume book, American Ornithology. Wilson’s text remains one of North America’s most important book of ornithology. Indeed, many consider Wilson the continent’s first ornithologist.

One of the many achievements of American Ornithology was to finally and definitively describe the Whip-poor-will, a common but reclusive bird of North America’s east coast. Before Wilson, early naturalists confused the Whip-poor-will with a related and more conspicuous bird, the Common Nighthawk. Confronting this confusion, Wilson writes that the Whip-poor-will has “never been described by any writer whose work I am acquainted.”

A photograph of a Whip-poor-will, which ChatGPT confused with the Common Nighthawk. — Whip-poor-will by flickr user Tom Murray. Some rights reserved.

It wasn’t that the Whip-poor-will wasn’t known to early European naturalists who visited the US. The bird’s name dates to the early 1700s, after all. What Wilson shows, over the course of 2.5 pages on the species, is something else. Early naturalists regularly confused the Whip-poor-will with other North American Nightjars, especially the Nighthawk. Illustrations of Whip-poor-wills often combined both birds’ features. This plate that appeared in Mark Catesby’s studies of North American birds is illustrative. The drawing combines the long, lanky shape of a Nighthawk with the bristles of a Whip-poor-will.

Catesby’s Nighthawk-Whip-Poor-Will Hybrid

Audubon, a professional rival of Wilson, downplayed Wilson’s effort. In his influential book, The Birds of America, Audubon writes.

Much has been said respecting the difference existing between the Whip-poor-will and the Night Hawk, for the purpose of shewing them to be distinct species. On this subject I shall only say, that I have known both birds from my early youth, and I have seldom seen a farmer or even a boy in the United States, who did not know the difference between them.

A Common Nighthawk, which ChatGPT confused for a Whip-poor-will. — Common Nighthawk. Photo by flickr user Brandon Trentler. Some Rights Reserved.

ChatGPT’s Effort

I suppose that Audubon and his unnamed farmers and boys would be bemused at ChatGPT, which appears stuck in the late-1700s on Whip-poor-wills. When I asked it to explain how Whip-poor-wills got their name, the chatbot opened with a muddled collection of errors. It also offered a word, hwipporu, that doesn’t seem to exist.

The bird species known as the Common Nighthawk, which is also known as the Whip-poor-will, is named for its call, which sounds like “whip-poor-will.” The species’ scientific name, Chordeiles minor, also refers to this call. The name is thought to be a derivation of the Old English word “hwipporu,” meaning “to make a noise.” The bird species is known for its distinctive nocturnal song which is usually heard at dusk and dawn. They are named after the call of the male bird which is a repetitive phrase, “whip-poor-will” which is sung as a territorial call or as a courtship call by males.

Here’s a list of errors that I’ve noticed.

The Common Nighthawk hasn’t been known as the Whip-poor-will since the late eighteenth century.
The scientific name of the Common Nighthawk is indeed Chordeiles minor. However, this doesn’t refer to the call of “whip-poor-will.” I cover the meaning of this name in my post about the Nighthawk.
I’ve not yet read that the name Whip-poor-will is thought to be a derivation of “hwipporu.” I’m curious to know more, but neither Google, Google Scholar, nor Google Books returns a single reference to this “Old English” word.
We indeed known Whip-poor-wills are indeed known song, which they give at dusk and dawn. This makes the call crepuscular, not nocturnal. (Of all the mistakes, this one is minor.)

That this account reflects understandings of birds from colonial America is stupefying. But it gives me some satisfaction and hope that artificial intelligence has not yet mastered what is obscure among us. Much of what is important to know falls into this category. After all, what remains obscure to us, and to the technologies we create, is simply that which we do not know well.

Find the obscure, the weird, the forgotten, and you will find something that the algorithms don’t yet care for. Such is the life of the Whip-poor-will, calling still from the rotten woods of our forest floors.

For more on ChatGPT’s struggles will birds, see my recent post on the chatbot’s effort to create a list of birds named after their song.

“The Night Side of the Woods”: Thoreau’s Whip-poor-will

For Henry David Thoreau, a Whip-poor-will’s call conjured a world we were already losing.

Prior to the 1950s, Americans interpreted the spring arrival of Whip-poor-wills as a sign and not always a welcome one. The birds foretold life and love, yes, but also illness and death. Those more dependent on the earth found something else: a message about impending frosts, storms, and ripened fruits.

After World War II, the Whip-poor-wills had all but disappeared from American consciousness. Sure, we saw a dramatic increase in roads, farms, clubs, and camps named after the bird. But the real thing? It called from ever decreasing patches of woods, often out of earshot of an increasingly indoor and alienated human species.

That is one story of how Whip-poor-wills came to inhabit only the wild edges of America. Another begins earlier by a century or more.

Tuesday, June 10, 1851, was “a beautiful summer night, not too warm, moon not quite full, after two or three rainy days.” The writer of these words, Henry David Thoreau, used the evening to walk to Fairhaven, Massachusetts, by railroad.

As he walked, he found himself farther from towns and his worry that “there would be too much white light, like the pale remains of daylight” on his walk. But he walked deeper into the night and, he writes simply, “it was better.” He encountered Whip-poor-wills and fireflies in meadows, and Nighthawks booming late in the evening.

Deeper into the night, Thoreau encountered fireflies and Whip-poor-wills in a meadow. — Photo by Tony Phan on Unsplash

Thoreau recognized the latter is a rare occurrence, indeed, writing,

I hear the nighthawks uttering their squeaking notes high in the air now at nine o’clock p. m., and occasionally—what I do not remember to have heard so late—their booming note.

Nighthawks are active at twilight; crepuscular birds, these are. It is a truism of their species accounts that they are very rarely active at night and, when they are, it’s usually to hunt insects drawn to artificial light. Perhaps Thoreau misjudged the time? Or perhaps the Nighthawks had been forced down the previous “two or three days” of rain and were making up for lost time.

As for the Whip-poor-wills, Thoreau recognized a broader story in their song. Here was not just natural history, but human history and culture.

The whip-poor-will suggests how wide asunder [are] the woods and the town. Its note is very rarely heard by those who live on the street, and then it is thought to be of ill omen. Only the dwellers on the outskirts of the village hear it occasionally. It sometimes comes into their yards. But go into the woods in a warm night at this season, and it is the prevailing sound. I hear now five or six at once. It is no more of ill omen therefore here than the night and the moonlight are. It is a bird not only of the woods, but of the night side of the woods.

Off hand, Thoreau suggests a tantalizing hypothesis: that the folklore and superstition surrounding the birds matured as everyday encounters with the real birds decreased. Americans once had an intimacy and knowledge of Nightjars born from familiarity. Thoreau is suggesting that, absent this, an unease and anxiety with the night side of things crept in.

In the next passage of his journal, Thoreau further recognized that the aural life of America was rapidly changing: “New beings have usurped the air we breathe, rounding Nature, filling her crevices with sound.”

I’m struck by an irony, as I type this, that I have written this entry with headphones on, a decade-old album filling Nature’s crevices with sound. Outside, this winter, are finches and sparrows, the rustle of towhees in the chokecherry thicket that edges my yard, and somewhere the trill of waxwings.

So to Thoreau’s words, return: “To sleep where you may hear the whip-poor-will in your dreams!”

Neither night bird, nor hawk: The Common Nighthawk

I do not know that Common Nighthawks would recognize themselves in the name we’ve given them. Neither hawk nor night bird, the Common Nighthawk is largely crepuscular — most active at dawn and dusk — and rarely, if ever, at night. Nor it is a hawk, belonging, instead, among the Nightjars.

The scientific name of the Nighthawk’s genus — Chordeiles — suits it better. According to Merriam-Webster, the word’s origin refers to the bird’s evening call

New Latin, irregular from Greek chordē string of a lyre or harp + deilē afternoon, evening: from its cry at twilight

Wikipedia offers an even more evocative etymology, evoking both the bird’s calls and their buoyant flights.

The genus name Chordeiles is from Ancient Greek khoreia, a dance with music, and deile, “evening”.

According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the common name “Nighthawk” dates to the early-17th century and to the King James Bible. Then, the phrase likely was a pseudonym for the Eurasian Nightjar. It appears in Leviticus, among a longer list of birds that, for being abominations, shall not be eaten.

And these are they which ye shall have in abomination among the fowls; they shall not be eaten, they are an abomination: the eagle, and the ossifrage, and the ospray,

¹⁴And the vulture, and the kite after his kind;

¹⁵Every raven after his kind;

¹⁶And the owl, and the night hawk, and the cuckow, and the hawk after his kind,

¹⁷And the little owl, and the cormorant, and the great owl,

¹⁸And the swan, and the pelican, and the gier eagle,

¹⁹And the stork, the heron after her kind, and the lapwing, and the bat.

In the late-18th century, the name was applied to North America’s Nighthawk. According to OED (again), the earliest published use of the name “nighthawk” was in Jonathan Carver’s 1778 book, Travels through the Interior Parts of North America.

Carver miscategorizes the bird, clustering it with hawks. He writes,

The NIGHT HAWK. This Bird is of the hawk species, its bill being crooked, its wings formed for swiftness, and its shape nearly like that of the common hawk; but in size it is considerably less, and in colour rather darker. It is scarcely ever seen but in the evening, when, at the approach of twilight, it flies about, and darts itself in wanton gambols at the head of the belated traveller. Before a thunder-shower these birds are seen at an amazing height in the air assembled together in great numbers, as swallows are observed to do on the same occasion.

Despite identifying the Nighthawk as a hawk, Carver’s observations are consistent with my own. I have stood amid Nighthawks making “wanton gambols at the head of the belated” birder. (I wrote about this for the Center for Humans and Nature. You can read that essay, “The Nighthawk’s Trajectory,” here: https://humansandnature.org/the-nighthawks-trajectory/.)

I have also seen great flocks of Nighthawks amid thunderstorms. Sometimes, they arrive as signs of incoming storms. Other times, they chase them. Presumably, the association of birds and storms carries another association — that the water leads to hatches of the bird’s prey (perhaps flying ants) or else causes prey to congregate in areas where Nighthawks might fetch them. I hope to not soon forget the dozens upon dozens of Nighthawks a friend and I saw feed amid a southern Colorado dry thunder storm.

Accordingly, I wrote a haiku for the birds.

dry thunder
a spray
of nighthawks

The meaning of the word “nighthawk” has become ever more expansive over the years. It carries shades of human meanings — to be a predatory person…at night.

The phrase has shed some of its negative connotations, now also simply meaning someone active at night. Though this meaning pre-dates Edward Hopper’s 1942 painting, “Nighthawks,” I suspect we owe the word’s lasting power to Hopper’s singular image.

I’d be remiss not to mention two other peculiar references that this bird’s name, has fed. Tom Wait’s album Nighthawks at the Diner is, no doubt, a nod to Hopper, even if a flock of Nighthawks over a desolate diner would be a site indeed.

And then there is this.

Historically, observers confused the Common Nighthawk with the Eastern Whip-poor-will. More on that in a later post. In the meantime, here’s a post on the Whip-poor-will and the history of its own name:

Featured Photo by vladeb @ https://flic.kr/p/nLR4Lq

From the Field #2: More Nighthawks, More Flying Ants

Last night, I arrived home from some errands around 6:30 PM to find a flock of Common Nighthawks feeding over my neighborhood in the southern suburbs of Denver. Two or three of the birds became several became a dozen then two then more still.

The birds flew wide laps around my neighborhood, occasionally streaming over my house. They were silent the entire time, as they fed on flying insects. The most likely prey were more flying ants. As I walked through my yard, I saw small insects taking flight. They stood out because they were not visiting, as the bees and flies and wasps and beetles do — my wildflowers. Rather, they seemed to float upward as they went.

I pursued a few of the insects, but most beat me to the sky. Finally, on a dog walk a bit later in the evening, I hawked one from its flight. (In truth, I cupped my hand in its path, causing it to land on my palm.) It was, indeed, a small flying ant.

The nighthawks looked dramatic in the late light of summer. Our western sun, as it dips toward the Rocky Mountains, is particularly strong and bright. The sun lit the nighthawks. Their white markings — their throats and underwings — shined.

The birds cast shadows on themselves, their long wings darkening their chests and flanks. This added to the drama of their flight, as they cut upward, backward, away, then back toward me.

I hope I never tire of this simple thrill — to be in the presence of these birds, who I barely understand. They seem to come out of nowhere. Not unlike the flying ants they pursue, which leave the rain-softened soil in late summer, nighthawks spend their days unseen. And where? Building tops? Perched on the cottonwoods lining the trails in Denver?

And then all at once, they arrive. Then all at once, they don’t.

In the Field #1: Common Nighthawks

On Friday night (August 12), a group of four or five Common Nighthawks (Chordeiles minor) joined a few swallows in feeding over my home and neighborhood. It’s always something when this happens — the birds flying relatively low, low enough to get good views (but not low enough for good photos).

The visit likely wasn’t a coincidence. Soon after the birds left, I spotted a few flying insects in my yard. They seem to be one of the nighthawks favored late-summer prey, flying ants, though I’m still working to confirm my tentative i.d.

According to the wonderful resource, Birds of the World (subscription required), a 1940 study of the stomach contents of 87 Nighthawks found that flying ants constituted about 25% of the mass of what the birds ate. Flying ants apparently emerge in late summer and, so, are a critical food source for migrating Nighthawks, not unlike late blooms (and feeders full of sugar water) are for migrating hummingbirds.

We’re in the early days of the Common Nighthawks’ southward migration. In past years, I’ve seen them in great numbers (for a suburban environment) in my neighborhood, encountering flocks of a dozen or two or three feeding over area parks. Here’s hoping this year brings the same.

Tag: Common Nighthawk