Noisy Night Jar

Sometime in mid-April we will hear our first whippoorwill call out into the night air. They have arrived in the northern Shenandoah Valley from Florida or Central America and are getting ready to gobble up countless insects and beget their next generation of chicks. No bird is quite as emphatic and clamorous as the whippoorwill. They begin to call, as deepening dusk settles over the area—the first calls of the season being primarily from the males, showing off their vocal skills to all available females within aural range.

The whippoorwill's scientific name—Caprimulgus vociferus—aptly captures this bird's insistent song. It is in the night jar family and is an onomatopoetic name—meaning that its call has essentially the same sound as its name: whip-poor-WILL. (Although I think a closer rendition of our local bird’s accent is something more like per-for-REAL. If you’ve ever heard one of these birds, try singing out these alternative renditions in a falsetto and see which seems closer… just be sure you are alone, or accompanied by congenial people.) 

One of these guys will begin to call out, and quickly seems to get seized by an urge to keep going, without pause, until he threatens to bring on himself a serious case of laryngitis. In fact, one intrepid ornithological accountant once recorded a performance of 1,088 continuous calls!

Recently sitting in the tub, as nightfall came on, I could make out three whippoorwills simultaneously calling—trying to outdo each other in the vociferousness department. As they repeatedly called, I wondered how they could be aware of their competitors presence. If you don't shut up and listen now and then, how can you know that you have rivals in the vicinity?

Because of its nocturnal habits, there is a lot of mystery about the behavior of the whippoorwill. Its coloring is cleverly cryptic. In the daytime they rest on the ground, so well camouflaged that you could step on one and not see it. In the dark they become really hard to spot. In fact, here's a cute bit of whippoorwill lore: while you might catch sight of a gaggle of geese, you'd more properly refer to it as an “invisibility” of whippoorwills.

So a whippoorwill is far more often heard than seen. Although I may hear a whippoorwill call anytime during the night, they are most active at dusk and just before dawn. Their gut has an amazing capacity—they can consume up to 2,000 small insects in one night! The female whippoorwill lays two eggs, which are timed to hatch as the moon is waxing. (Can they really read a moon almanac?) That way, the parents can see bugs all night, to catch and feed their ravenous youngsters. Or maybe they need the bright moonlight to see their own cryptically-colored chicks in the dark?

I sat there soaking, listening to the three insistent whippoorwills call—seemingly ignorant of each other. At least that's how it seemed to me. Their repetition rate varied all over the place, so they sounded like three tin-eared musicians, oblivious to the fact that their calls were both out of sync and out of tune with each other. It was a lousy trio! They lack the harmonizing skills of katydids that I'll be hearing in another couple of months, when a dozen or more of them will call out and gradually get in sync with each other, until the woods literally throb with the pulse of their calls.