“If the bird should be discovered and attacked, we may imagine how often the whippoorwill, with its marvelous powers of flight, may escape hawk, owl, or fox.”
The above quote by Winsor Marrett Tyler, who contributed the chapter on the Eastern Whip-poor-will in Arthur Cleveland Bent’s monumental Life Histories of North American Birds, attempts to capture the essence of the flight powers of this member of the family Caprimulgidae—nightjars and allies—who are perhaps best known for their distinctive calls that punctuate the night. The tale that follows will prove the quote not always to be true.
Early this month, I spent a few mornings in a photo blind at Mirror Pond, one of the small bodies of water at Fair Meadows Sanctuary, hoping to photograph birds, especially migrating waterfowl. As I was preparing to wrap up one of these sessions, I suddenly spotted a raptor flying above a stand of dead ash trees across the pond—a beautiful juvenile Cooper’s Hawk. I captured a few images of the hawk in flight and then briefly glanced down. When I looked up, there were now two birds in the sky—the hawk and a smaller bird. What I witnessed next was a once-in-a-lifetime experience. The hawk began to chase the bird, initiating an aerial joust. It gracefully struck at its intended prey, knocking it off balance but failing to make a capture. Shortly thereafter, it succeeded, after which it flew off, clutching its victim. According to the metadata timestamps on the series of images that I made and later reviewed, the entire encounter lasted seven seconds! In the heat of the moment, I could not figure out what species the victim was. It was slender and dark, sort of like a starling, but seemingly much too big. When I later looked at the photos, they confirmed that the bird was unmistakably an Eastern Whip-poor-will, a nocturnal and crepuscular bird that one almost never sees out in the open during daytime hours, and even more rarely in flight. Telltale identifying features included the large eye, small bill and feet, prominent rictal bristles (relating to rictus: the opening, or gape of a bird), rounded wings, grayish-brown brindled dorsal plumage, and light-colored outer feathers of the disheveled tail. The outer tail feathers were buffy rather than white, indicating that the individual was a female. I assume that she had been roosting on a nearby limb and was discovered and flushed by the hawk.
This was my second-ever sighting of a whip-poor-will, the only other time being an occasion when I inadvertently flushed an unseen bird roosting on the woodland floor at Fair Meadows. As I approached closely, the whip-poor-will silently flew away from its ground perch like a giant moth. All our other documented records of whip-poor-wills at Fair Meadows—none since 2019—have been in spring and early summer, when we have heard them uttering their onomatopoeic WHIP-poor-WILL call.
By all accounts, the Eastern Whip-poor-will—until 2010 considered conspecific with the Mexican Whip-poor-will and known simply as the Whip-poor-will—is in steady decline. Accurate determination of its status is made difficult because it is so difficult to see, owing to its excellent camouflage and its crepuscular and nocturnal habits. Most observations are made by hearing the bird’s nocturnal call.
Favored nesting habitat of this exquisitely cryptic bird is dry deciduous or mixed forests with little or no underbrush. We hope that results of our ongoing efforts to provide this type of habitat at Fair Meadows will encourage this appealing bird to return to our woodlands as a nesting species.
Written by Gary Shackelford, Fair Meadows Sanctuary manager
Cover photo by Gary Shackelford. A juvenile Cooper’s Hawk in the sky over Fair Meadows.
