Editor’s note: The following column was originally published in the New Hampshire Union Leader on Aug. 7, 1971.
DURING THE SUMMER, if one is a city dweller, it is very common to hear a rather loud “peent,” and this is especially so toward dusk. It is this sound that caused one of our readers in Manchester to write:
“For several years I have heard these ‘night’ birds beeping around buildings where there were bright lights, but could only rarely see them, if they happened to go over a street light. Now that I live catty-corner to the new Court House the floodlights that shine on that building reflect on the undersides which seem to be white or very light colored. I am wondering if they are nighthawks and what they are after. They seem to be up too high to be after bugs or millers. Of course they do swoop down out of sight. They make a constant beep-beep.”
Our reader is correct in that she has been hearing and observing nighthawks over the past several years. I can remember as a youngster when visiting my Grandfather Ward, who lived in the city of Keene, of looking forward to dusk when these birds would apparently come from nowhere and swoop and cry over the city.
There were two great elm trees on the lawn of the house where Grandfather lived and it was in these trees that at least some of the city nighthawks spent many of the daytime hours. Grandfather pointed one of them out to me, for he knew early evening and nighttime forays. I couldn’t make out anything on the elm limbs to which he was pointing, which was quite high from the ground, and yet I knew that there must be one of these birds there.
Whenever we went for walks together Grandfather always carried a small pair of field glasses, wrapped in a linen handkerchief, in his suit coat pocket. Not having the glasses with him at this particular time, he said, “You keep studying the limb while I go get the glasses.” But study as I might, I still could not make out a bird in the elm.
However, when Grandfather returned and gave me the glasses I quickly saw what I had thought was a lump on a limb was really a nighthawk. I remember well that I had expected to see a bird perched crosswise of a limb as the birds I knew always sat that way. However, the nighthawk perches lengthwise of a limb and thus with its natural camouflage if makes itself mightily inconspicuous.
Nighthawks have become city dwellers partly because of the tar and gravel, and flat roofs which are in abundance in most cities. Not being nest builders naturally, they simply lay their eggs at some point on the roof and brood them there. Their natural nesting place was on a flat rock or on gravel.
The nighthawk is not only a most interesting bird but it is most useful in that its diet consists wholly of insects and apparently insects of all kinds. It is not, of course, a hawk, for its bill is very wide, it has an extremely large mouth, and its feet are not at all designed to hold prey. I suppose it gains the name “hawk” from the phrase which is used in literature on the bird — “which hawks about ... seeking its insect prey.” Actually, the bird is a member of the goatsucker family and this means that it is a full cousin to the whippoorwill. The whippoorwill also is nocturnal in its feeding, lives on a diet of insects, and flies in an erractic manner much the same as the nighthawk.
It will be only a few weeks now, two or three perhaps, before those of use who live in river valleys will begin to see these birds in waves of a hundred or more. For it is late August that the southward movement of the nighthawks begins.
In earlier columns I have written of their manner of flight and feeding on the wing as they travel, and I have pointed out that in our Ashuelot River Valley of West Swanzey these birds always seem to be traveling in a southwesterly direction. There are many times, however, when you will see these flocks traveling in a northerly direction. I can only assume this is a temporary expedient, perhaps because the river, itself, may be traveling in a northerly direction at that point, for they seem to migrate along river valleys toward the south.
Late afternoon until dark are the best times to watch the skies for these birds.
.
Stacey Cole, Nature Talks columnist for more than 50 years, passed away in 2014. If readers have a favorite column written by Stacey that they would like to see reprinted, please drop a note to Jen Lord at jlord@unionleader.com.
