(_Chordeiles virginianus_) Goatsucker family
_Called also_: NIGHTJAR; BULL-BAT; MOSQUITO HAWK;
WILL-O'-THE-WISP; PISK; PIRAMIDIG; LONG-WINGED GOATSUCKER
(Illustration facing p. 154)
_Length_--9 to 10 inches. About the same length as the robin,
but apparently much longer because of its very wide
wing-spread.
_Male and Female_--Mottled blackish brown and rufous above,
with a multitude of cream-yellow spots and dashes. Lighter
below, with waving bars of brown on breast and underneath.
White mark on throat, like an imperfect horseshoe; also a band
of white across tail of male bird. These latter markings are
wanting in female. Heavy wings, which are partly mottled, are
brown on shoulders and tips, and longer than tail. They have
large white spots, conspicuous in flight, one of their
distinguishing marks from the whippoorwill. Head large and
depressed, with large eyes and ear-openings. Very small bill.
_Range_--From Mexico to arctic islands.
_Migrations_--May. October. Common summer resident.
The nighthawk's misleading name could not well imply more that the
bird is not: it is not nocturnal in its habits, neither is it a hawk,
for if it were, no account of it would be given in this book, which
distinctly excludes birds of prey. Stories of its chicken-stealing
prove to be ignorant rather than malicious slanders. Any one disliking
the name, however, surely cannot complain of a limited choice of other
names by which, in different sections of the country, it is quite as
commonly known.
Too often it is mistaken for the whippoorwill. The nighthawk does not
have the weird and woful cry of that more dismal bird, but gives
instead a harsh, whistling note while on the wing, followed by a
vibrating, booming, whirring sound that Nuttall likens to "the rapid
turning of a spinning wheel, or a strong blowing into the bung-hole of
an empty hogshead." This peculiar sound is responsible for the name
nightjar, frequently given to this curious bird. It is said to be made
as the bird drops suddenly through the air, creating a sort of
stringed instrument of its outstretched wings and tail. When these
wings are spread, their large white spots running through the feathers
to the under side should be noted to further distinguish the
nighthawk from the whippoorwill, which has none, but which it
otherwise closely resembles. This booming sound, coming from such a
height that the bird itself is often unseen, was said by the Indians
to be made by the shad spirits to warn the scholes of shad about to
ascend the rivers to spawn in the spring, of their impending fate.
The flight of the nighthawk is free and graceful in the extreme.
Soaring through space without any apparent motion of its wings,
suddenly it darts with amazing swiftness like an erratic bat after the
fly, mosquito, beetle, or moth that falls within the range of its
truly hawk-like eye.
Usually the nighthawks hunt in little companies in the most sociable
fashion. Late in the summer they seem to be almost gregarious. They
fly in the early morning or late afternoon with beak wide open,
hawking for insects, but except when the moon is full they are not
known to go a-hunting after sunset. During the heat of the day and at
night they rest on limbs of trees, fence-rails, stone walls,
lichen-covered rocks or old logs--wherever Nature has provided
suitable mimicry of their plumage to help conceal them.
With this object in mind, they quite as often choose a hollow surface
of rock in some waste pasture or the open ground on which to deposit
the two speckled-gray eggs that sixteen days later will give birth to
their family. But in August, when family cares have ended for the
season, it is curious to find this bird of the thickly wooded country
readily adapting itself to city life, resting on Mansard roofs,
darting into the streets from the house-tops, and wheeling about the
electric lights, making a hearty supper of the little, winged insects
they attract.