Country music singer Randy Travis crooned in one of my favorite songs that his love for his sweetheart is “longer than the song of a whip-poor-will.” I pondered this the other evening as I sat with a friend on his back porch in southeast DeKalb County and listened to a male Eastern whip-poor-will calling from the nearby woods.
As is its species’ habit, the bird repeated its call — so aptly interpreted as “whip-poor-will” — over and over again. When I headed home an hour later, it was still calling.
Fom past experience, I knew that the calling could go on all night. The whip-poor-will’s call — and that of its close cousin the chuck-will’s widow — were the essence of a summer night when I was growing up in South Carolina. In fact, the two birds’ plaintive songs are so similar that they are indistinguishable to many people. (I wonder, though, how popular Travis’s song would be had he used chuck-will’s-widow instead of whip-poor-will.)
Both species are members of the “goatsucker” family: Because the birds long ago haunted goat herds at dusk, they were believed to milk the animals and live on milk. We now know, though, that the birds really were lured by the flying insects that the goats attracted. But the name goatsucker stuck, even outranking the birds’ other common name, nightjar, which comes from their calls that seem to jar the night.
A third goatsucker species in Georgia is the common nighthawk, which can be seen chasing insects around the lights of Turner Field during night games.
Although it’s easy to hear a whip-poor-will or a chuck-will’s-widow, most people never see one. The birds sleep during the day and emerge at night to chase flying insects. Their beaks are small, but they open their mouths wide to sweep in the bugs.
Also, their brindled plumage blends perfectly with the gray-brown leaf litter of the open forests where they breed and roost. They build their “nests” — simple depressions, really — on the ground in bare leaves or pine straw.
Their nesting seasons, which started in April, continues through this month. The whip-poor-will nests mostly north of the fall line; the chuck-will’s-widow nests throughout Georgia except in the mountains. Come September, Georgia’s goatsuckers will head south to spend the winter in Latin America.
IN THE SKY: The moon, which will be new on Monday, will be a thin crescent low in the west at dusk on Tuesday, said David Dundee, Tellus Science Museum astronomer. Venus is low in the west just after dark and sets about two hours after sunset, and will appear close to the moon on Wednesday evening. Mars and Jupiter are low in the east just before sunrise. Saturn is high in the west just after dark and sets around midnight.
