Whippoorwill, April, 2020, Denver, Colorado
People always ask me how to get into birding and I always tell them the same thing: start in your backyard. Think globally, bird locally. Set up a feeder, get a field guide, pay attention. It’s not rocket science; it’s bird-watching.
Print that on an Audubon mug.
Still, it’s intimidating. I get that. Birding feels seems so learned, so academic, you don’t want to step in as a novice and expose your total ignorance. It’s like a high-stakes blackjack table, just with less creepy dudes in Ray-Bans. Whenever I go out birding with actual birders I’m in awe of their abilities. They identify birds I’ve never heard of from so far away, both by sight and sound – like superheroes with arthritis. I console myself by remembering that these birders have been at it for a long time; they weren’t born with this skill set, it was accrued. Also, birders are entirely non-judgmental. They’re un-intimidating, generous people—liberal environmentalists who like nothing more than sharing their excitement for their hobby, preferably over a few craft beers.
Except, of course, for the occasional brash dickhead who’s overcompensating for his tiny dick with his massive camera lens, but fuck Dwight. SORRY I CAN’T TELL A SHARP-SHINNED FROM A COOPER’S HAWK, DWIGHT!
But in my neighborhood—and only in my neighborhood—I’m quite confident in my birding abilities. I toe that fine line between brash and debonair, depending on the day’s outfit. And it all started with my backyard feeder. I familiarized myself with the species that flocked to that first (sparrows, house finches, chickadees, etc.), then expanded outward, to the surrounding blocks, (magpies, robins, flickers, blue jays, etc.), then onto the massive park nearby (double-breasted cormorants, snowy egrets, a handful of resident graylag geese, so much more). Now I’m a regular neighborhood expert. When it comes to the birds of City Park West in Denver Colorado, Adam Cayton-Holland is your guy. And if anybody offers you a better deal, I’ll match or beat it—that’s the ACH guarantee!
Other things I can guarantee include referring to myself in the third-person as “ACH,” and that if you tell me something while we’re drinking I will not remember it. Guaranteed!
So imagine my frustration when a bird started coming around my house that I absolutely couldn’t identify. Especially because this was during those early pandemic days of shelter-in-place, when I was home all day, every day, bored out of my mind; I was observing absolutely everything with unnerving intensity. Yet somehow this bird eluded me. It was too fast. I’d be out in the front yard and something would whip by at eye level and I’d try to study it but it would be up and over a rooftop and gone just as quickly as it had burst onto the scene. It had the GISS of a bird of prey but I couldn’t tell which one.
A brief aside about GISS.
GISS stands for General Impression of Size and Shape. And yes, it’s pronounced the exact same way you pronounce “jizz.” There’s no way to be an adult about this fact, and yet birders do it all the time. Whenever you’re out birding, and you get a glimpse of a bird but not a solid look, you go off of the general impression of size and shape, the GISS. It’s an oft-used term.
EXAMPLE: I couldn’t positively identify that bird because I didn’t get a good enough look, but it had the GISS of a loggerhead shrike so let’s just go ahead and call it a loggerhead shrike.
Birders do this everyday, unironically. It had the GISS of this, it had the GISS of that. GISS, GISS, GISS, all the time GISS. And still whenever someone says GISS I giggle like a simple boy, because in my head GISS is semen and GISS will always be semen and I can’t help but picture these birders identifying a bird from its cum and that’s hilarious every time and I’m tired of pretending it isn’t. I can’t keep living this lie.
But back to the bird.
It was like it didn’t want to be seen. I kept getting blurry flashes of it, but they were never long enough to make anything out of. It was small, that was for sure, but the best I could guess was a kestrel. But I’ve seen many kestrels. This was different—more elusive. I vowed to keep an eye out for it to get a positive identification but then days would pass with no sighting and I’d forget about it.
It was during one of these out-of-sight-out-of-mind stretches that I took the trash out in the early evening, and noticed something sitting on the sidewalk directly in front of my house, a squat, brown, blob that seemed to be quivering. At first glance I thought it was an injured rodent. I approached cautiously but wound up spooking the little bugger and much to my surprise it flew! It made an irritated week-week sound as it darted into my neighbor’s yard across the street, landing abruptly in a clump of garden dirt.
I crept up slowly until I was mere feet away from the bird, looking right at it: it looked like a squashed hawk.
The word formed in my mind: whippoorwill.
It’s one of those birds that immediately conjures a mood. I hear whippoorwill and I’m transported to a dusty, country lane; night is encroaching, a warm wind whispers softly through the trees. I see back porches and clotheslines, the moon illuminated in the face of a lake, dark woods beyond. I hear the din of cicadas and the croaking of frogs, and above them all, unmistakable, I hear the urgent call of the whippoorwill.
I’m not the only one to succumb to the magic of the bird. Hank Williams felt it.
Hear that lonesome whippoorwill/He sounds too blue to fly/The midnight train is whining low/I’m so lonesome I could cry
Thoreau too.
The note of the whippoorwill borne over the fields is the voice with which the woods and moonlight woo me.
And that’s exactly it. That wooing. There’s an enticement to the sound, it feels meaningful and symbolic, like an important invitation, but to what?
Turns out, death.
Most of the mythology surrounding the whippoorwill is foreboding. This is true of almost all nocturnal birds, but the ominous connotations are particularly strong around the whippoorwill. It didn’t help that no-less than Aristotle christened them goatsuckers. Apparently in need of a break from hard philosophizing, Aristotle took a side trip into ornithology to mistakenly report that whippoorwills sucked milk from goats’ udders, causing the udders to dry up. In actuality, whippoorwills don’t drink milk at all—they eat insects, feeding with their giant mouths wide open, vacuuming up bugs like a whale with krill. What Aristotle probably witnessed was a whippoorwill snagging flies congregated around the belly of a goat. But you try and to change the narrative Aristotle writes for you and see how successful you are. The name stuck. The family name for the bird, to this day, is Caprimulgidae, from the Latin capri and mulgus, meaning goat-milker.
Thankfully cooler heads have prevailed and more tactful ornithologists now refer to the birds as nightjars.
Still, they scare the shit out of people.
Early American folklore is lousy with whippoorwill dread. If a whippoorwill was seen or heard near a house, it meant that someone inside was close to death, the bird there to steal their departing soul. H.P. Lovecraft seized on that notion in a popular story called, “The Dunwich Horror.”
“The natives are mortally afraid of the numerous whippoorwills which grow vocal on warm nights,” he wrote. “It is vowed that the birds are psychopomps lying in wait for the souls of the dying, and that they time their eerie cries in unison with the sufferer’s struggling breath. If they can catch the fleeing soul when it leaves the body, they instantly flutter away chittering in daemoniac laughter.”
It’s unclear what natives he was referencing, as well as whatever the fuck a psychopomp is – but according to the Native American tradition of the Omaha tribe, one should never answer the call of the whippoorwill, for if you do, and it does not answer back, death is now on your heels. The Hopi and the Pueblo also associate the bird with the underworld. But for the Mohegan tribe the bird was mysterious, but not fatal. They believed that whippoorwills were actually enchanted Little People, harmless, mystical spirits who moved throughout the forest at night. The Iroquois seemed similarly smitten, believing that moccasin flowers’ petals were actually shoes for the bird.
My favorite legend comes from the Utes of Utah and Colorado, who believed that the whippoorwill was actually a god of the night, granted with the the power to transform a frog into the moon.
I like this interpretation far more than imminent death.
I tried to confirm my sighting using my bird guide, but as is often the case, this made me more confused. The bird looked like a whippoorwill but it also looked like a nighthawk. Aren’t they the same thing? If not, what’s the difference? Either way, exactly how rare was the sighting? I e-mailed my friend Norm.
Every birder should be so lucky to have a Norm in their lives. He’s the best birder I know. He leads birding outings for the Denver Museum of Nature and Science in addition to taking groups out all over the world. Norm’s got a dry wit and sends out great group e-mails about all the birds he’s seen recently, replete with photos. He closes his missives with, “well, that’s enough yammering from me I suppose.” Norm’s a mensch, and extremely generous with his vast ornithological knowledge.
Norm confirmed that what I had seen was, in fact, a whippoorwill. The common nighthawk, he explained, is long and slender and in flight appears stiff-winged, with white wing-bands that are very obvious. I had seen no such bands. The whippoorwill is smaller, darker and stub-tailed, and often seen on the ground. Those traits all perfectly described the bird I saw on my sidewalk. Based off of that, Norm deemed it a whippoorwill. He said that they are not rare, per se, but that they are incredibly hard to see.
“I have only seen a couple in the field in all my years,” he wrote. “That’s a great find! Congrats!”
In my handful of birding experiences with Norm I’ve found him to be calm and measured, enthusiastic but hardly effusive. So I interpreted his exclamations points as confirmation of what I was already feeling in my bones: that this sighting was special. I vowed right then to not go flapping my gums about the bird to just anyone, my typical behavior. I vowed to keep my encounter with the whippoorwill as a select reserve, something to share only with those who could truly appreciate it. Because people will often ask you about your curious hobby of birding and then halfway through an anecdote you can see the lights go off behind their eyes. They nod politely and respond to my enthusiasm but they have no idea how rare one sighting is versus another. I can tell them about seeing a whippoorwill or a bald eagle or a robin and in their mind it’s all the same.
Adam saw a bird. Good for him!
It’s understandable, but disheartening, and I didn’t want that for this sighting. I wanted my experience to remain as noteworthy as I found it to be.
So I’ll keep this memory tucked away for myself, hidden and treasured. I’ll try to take it out only when I need to, when I need to go somewhere else, to that dusty country lane in my mind. If I’m careful, and I don’t go to the well too often, hopefully it will work. The magic won’t wear off. I’ll be able to conjure the memory of that whippoorwill and it will take me away to a place that is still and quiet. A place where people listen and observe. I wonder if that place is real, if the whippoorwill, imbued with the mystical powers of a psychopomp, bestowed upon me a vision of an actual location somewhere in my future—the place I’ll retire to, out in the sticks somewhere, when I’m an old, distinguished gentleman, far more debonair than brash. In my mind, I’ve become an established birder by then, one who doesn’t laugh at GISS anymore, whose expertise extends far beyond his backyard feeder. I can see myself sitting on the porch listening to the sounds of the onomatopoeia birds like the killdeer and the chickadee and the cuckoo and the whippoorwill, looking up at the moon and smiling because I know that once it was a frog.
