Hearing a whippoorwill
Hearing a whippoorwill is hearing a bird you will probably never see: it calls its name after dark and spends the day on the forest floor, disguised as a patch of dead leaves. It is a voice without a face.
What it may mean
Few people who hear a whippoorwill ever see one. The bird spends the day on the forest floor, mottled like dead leaves, and after dark it calls its own name again and again from a branch or a patch of ground nobody can pick out. Folklore filled that invisible voice with warnings. In Patagonia the cry of a nightjar in the mountains foretold sickness and death, and a list of bird lore printed in 1903 cautioned that mocking a whippoorwill would set your house on fire. Many relationships now run by voice alone: the coworker you have spoken with for years and never met, the friend who lives in your phone. You know their rhythms, their pauses, the way they laugh at their own jokes, and almost nothing of how they look sitting on a porch in June.
Depending on how you saw it
Calling on a moonlit night
Whippoorwills hunt moths in flight and are busiest on bright, moonlit nights, when they can see their prey against the sky. Their best hours are the ones most people sleep through. Which of your own best hours do other people miss entirely?
One singing near the house
An entry in Daniels and Stevans holds that a whippoorwill singing on a gatepost or doorstep warns that someone in the house will die, though rural families heard them close by all summer and went on living. Which sound near your home did someone in your family always treat as a warning?
Hearing fewer than you used to
People who grew up in the country often say the summer night chorus is thinner than it was, and eastern whippoorwills have indeed declined, partly, researchers think, because flying insects have become scarcer. Which summer sound from when you were young would you most like to hear again?
Why it happens in nature
The eastern whippoorwill is a nightjar of eastern North American woods that catches moths and other insects in flight at dusk and at night. Its mottled brown plumage hides it on the forest floor, where it also nests, so it is far more often heard than seen. The species has declined, partly because flying insects have become scarcer.
What folk beliefs say
Patagonia
The Patagonians believed that the cry of the nightjar in the Cordilleras foretold sickness and death.
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. 670. View the page
To reflect on
Who do you know well by voice or message alone, and what do you imagine about the rest?