Whip-Poor-Will: Spirits of the Night

Like a spirit of the night, the whip-poor-will appears between us, floating measuredly on wide and silent wings. In the dull light of the fog-shrouded moon, he is a floating silhouette of deep browns and blacks. Despite deep, billowing wing beats, the phantom does not rustle the air into sound. He hovers for only a moment and then, as ephemeral as his evening song, the whip-poor-will is gone; vanished into the darkness of the of the summer night.
It is sometime past midnight when we have our close encounter. We stare intently across the thin swath of grassland that runs like a spine across the oak-savannah forest, our eyes straining into the shadows of the ancient oaks against a starless night sky. The bird is gone, and our speaker still rings out loudly with the incessant “whip-POOR-will,” but our bird does not call back. Hoping the bird will return, we wade deeper into the dew soaked grass, clear a path for our net, and quickly set two poles twelve meters apart, running the fine mesh mist netting between the two. With our speaker calling enticingly from the center, the net covers an eight food swath of the night sky. We retreat to hide among the tall grass, and wait.
Since the steady collapse of the sun from the sky hours ago, we’ve watched a thick fog settle over the prairie. In the soft evening light, the fog glowed with the effervescence of fireflies. Then, like the changing of the guard, the diurnal songbirds sang their final chords before vanishing into the trees as the bats materialized from the abyss and the tree frog’s chorus begun. When the sky turns dark, just as all avian life seems to be drawn out of the air until morning, the whip-poor-will begin their calls and the world is alive again.
But now, even the nocturnal creatures have settled into the silence and the moon has been shrouded into a vague glow. Here, we are diurnal creatures far out of place. A lone lark sparrow erupts in the darkness from some unknown land, out of place and singular. But this whip-poor-will is curious of our speaker, perhaps confused by the gangling hominids in his territory. In the blind chunk of night, we strain our ears, listening for the invisible bird. After a few minutes, we check the nets to find the ghost bird cradled delicately in the mesh.

In our hands, the whip-poor-will is strikingly unique, unlike any bird of the daytime. His intense blue eyes radiate life, squinting against our headlamps. Enormously thick and deeply layered down feathers explain his silent flight. Needle-like bristles extend around a stunted beak that opens impossibly wide when foraging for insects on the wing. And his camouflage is a striking combination of grays and browns and blacks to blend in with the scattered leaf litter of his ground nest.
We are here to attach GPS trackers to these elusive birds so that we may learn how and when they migrate and where they go. Each whip-poor-will receives a miniature backpack that will track their movements across continents, which must be retrieved next season to collect the data. We handle the bird carefully and efficiently; attaching the tag like a backpack around his wings and placing a unique aluminum band around one leg to identify it in the future. In several minutes, we are done and the bird is released to the wild to etch its global story into the GPS.

In the year since these long summer nights, the whip-poor-wills have lived through an incredible journey. After many nights of humans trudging through the dark — setting up and breaking down nets, waiting, chasing, and banding — eleven birds from last season were re-caught and the GPS tags recovered. The data held in the tags illustrate an expansive flight; from those humble, nondescript woods, the whip-poor-wills traveled across seven states, through national borders, over desert and ocean and mountain. Alas, a brief but valuable piece of story in the whip-poor-wills life is revealed.
But the essence of mystique still lives vividly in the forests where the whip-poor-wills shout their calls. Their presence defines an entire place. Somberly, whip-poor-will populations have declined by 75% in the last fifty years and in some parts of their range they have completely disappeared (North American Breeding Bird Survey). Steadily, it seems, this iconic creature is vanishing permanently into the night. As scientists continue to dig deeper into the lives of these otherworldly birds, we must think critically about the future of this species and ask ourselves what were are willing to do to keep them in our woods.
Thank you to the Tonra Lab of Avian Ecology at OSU and Jay Wright for bringing me along on this project!
