Birds chirping at night
Birds chirping at night are most often an unmated male mockingbird singing for a mate, or migrants calling overhead. Those short flight calls seem to help a scattered flock keep in touch in the dark.
What it may mean
On spring and fall nights, much of the chirping overhead comes from birds you will never see. Thrushes, warblers and sparrows migrate in the dark and give short, high calls as they fly, each species its own, which seem to help them keep in touch; researchers even count the calls to track migration. A flock spread across miles of black sky holds together on a few notes a minute. People keep each other close in a similar way when life moves fast: a two-word text after a hard meeting, a quick call from the car, a thumbs-up from another time zone. None of it looks like much, and all of it counts. Lying awake under that faint traffic, you might ask who you have been meaning to check on, and whose small signals have been keeping you on course.
Depending on how you saw it
Robins singing in a noisy city
A study of European robins in the city of Sheffield found that they sang at night chiefly where daytime noise was loudest, as if waiting for the traffic to stop. The still hours were simply the only time they could be heard. Who do you hear from late at night, once the rest of their day has gone quiet?
A mockingbird singing all night
In late spring, a northern mockingbird singing at 2 a.m. is very often an unpaired male; males with a mate sing by day. He can keep it up night after night, cycling through dozens of borrowed phrases until a female settles nearby. What have you kept trying long after others would have stopped?
A whip-poor-will calling at dusk
The whip-poor-will is named for its call, which it can repeat hundreds of times without a break on a summer night. It hunts moths in the dark and sings from the woods' edge. Which phrase do people link with you because you say it so often?
Why it happens in nature
Most songbirds rest at night, but some sing in the dark on purpose: unpaired mockingbirds, nightingales in Europe and Asia, and nightjars such as the whip-poor-will, which feed at dusk. Migrating songbirds call while flying at night, and city lights and daytime noise can push some birds' singing into the dark hours.
What folk beliefs say
Germany (Orlamünde)
At the castle of Orlamünde in Germany, servants who heard a little bird chirping at night took it as a sign that the White Lady who haunted the castle was coming to warn the household of some coming trouble.
Source: Cora Linn Daniels; C. M. Stevans (eds.), Encyclopaedia of Superstitions, Folklore, and the Occult Sciences of the World, vol. 3 (1903), vol. 3, p. 1206. View the page
Native American lore
In Native American lore recorded in 1903, when whip-poor-wills sang together at night and one bird seemed to answer "no," a person would soon die if the singing stopped at once, but would live long if the birds kept singing.
Source: Cora Linn Daniels; C. M. Stevans (eds.), Encyclopaedia of Superstitions, Folklore, and the Occult Sciences of the World, vol. 2 (1903), vol. 2, p. 716. View the page
To reflect on
Who keeps you on course with small check-ins, and who might be waiting for one from you?