The logging trucks are hard at work hauling out the thicket of pine trees that have towered over the land of my childhood in Kittrell. While I understand that harvesting timber is a necessary part of the maturation process and the local economy, I can't help but notice that as the forest landscape has changed over the past three summers in the southern part of Vance County, so has the musical underscore.
The lonesome sound of the whip-poor-will that Hank Williams crooned about is gone.
I have fond memories of the Summer of 1988 when I was learning how to sing harmony for the first time and would spend hours finding the low and high harmonies for the male whip-poor-will's mating call. The faithful repetition of the nocturnal bird's song, as it turns out, allows for a generous sampling of vocal and whistle-tone free-style.
But it seems that since the trees have rolled out in mass, horizontal Peterbuilt parades, the lead singer has left the band.
According to the Audubon Society, the Eastern Whip-poor-will belongs to a group of nocturnal insect-eating birds known as “nightjars” because of their nocturnal habits and the jarring aspect of their vocalizations. Their name is also their lyric.
Its population has apparently been in decline for decades, blamed mostly on insecticides for diminishing its food supply and logging practices for habitat loss.
Whip-poor-wills perch on branches or sit on the ground where they fly up to catch beetles, mosquitoes, gnats, and a variety of moths. Relying primarily on vision, the birds are most active on moonlit nights when moths and other nocturnal insects are backlit against the bright night sky.
Following the lunar cycle, they lay two eggs on the ground, usually along the edges of a forest near a clearing. The male and the female take turns guarding the nest and the eggs hatch about ten days prior to the full moon.
Multiple studies have recorded the elusive birds' decline in Northern states like Pennsylvania and West Virginia and they were designated as a threatened species in Canada and Ontario.
According to these reports, nightjars, as a group, were found to be experiencing the steepest decline of all insectivorous birds and overall whip-poor-will detection declined 42 percent in the last six years.
Also, their thirteen-state breeding range is clearly shrinking fast as the Audubon's climate model projects this species to lose 78 percent by 2080, threatening to evict them from North Carolina altogether.
In 2007,the Center for Conservation Biology – a cooperative of the College of William and Mary and Virginia Commonwealth University - formed the National Nightjar Survey to collect current nightjar distribution and population data. The NCWildlife Resources Commission is a partner in this effort.
"On scheduled moonlit nights, volunteers conduct standardized roadside counts by driving and stopping at 10 points along a predetermined route," their website reads. "At each point, observers count nightjars seen or heard during a six-minute period."
There is also a great page on the survey's website (http://www.nightjars.org/learn/) that allows you to hear the calls of the eleven species of nightjars, including the Eastern whip-poor-will. You can also sign-up to collect 2018 data in your area as the birds migrate back to Carolina in the Spring.
This two-hour time donation could make for a romantic (and free) date night – just saying. Please remember to decline the ensuing snipe-hunting invitation.
Randy Travis bragged in song that a country boy's love is "Higher than the pine trees growing tall upon the hill, and longer than the song of a whip-poor-will." Here's hoping that song continues.
- This article originally ran in the Henderson Dispatch.