A vocabulary of landscape — a landscape of words
1039 entries
whippoorwill
The whippoorwill is a nightjar of eastern North American woodland, mottled in bark colors and effectively invisible on the ground by day. It hunts moths at night on long silent wings with an enormous bristle-fringed gape, and it repeats its name in a loud clear three-note call for hours from a perch, sometimes several hundred times without a break.
Etymology
The name is the call written down, and it is one of the most exact examples in English. It belongs with the poorwill and the chuck-will’s-widow in a family that has named itself repeatedly, which happens because the birds are heard constantly and seen almost never.
Notes
It times its breeding to the moon. The eggs hatch roughly ten days before a full moon, so the period when the chicks need the most food coincides with the brightest nights for hunting moths. The call is loud enough at close range to be hard to sleep through, and there is a body of American folklore treating it as an omen, most of which is about somebody dying.