The first one in mid-spring is a joy. Far off, in the distance, over the burble of the creek and shush of the wind across the ridge--a haunting, plaintiff yet ebullient voice cries "Whippoorwill! Whippoorwill!" The first of us to hear it calls the other to the front porch. Listen. How wonderful, we say. Now I am thinking shotgun.
"What a stupid, boring and obnoxious bird with no welcome near human bedrooms" I think in my half-sleep, not ready to get up in the crepuscular gloom but long since rattled awake by this bird's tintinnabulation of the bells bells bells bells bells bells!!! Liquid ditty my Aunt Fanny! He's right outside our window now, drawing closer and closer these last two hours of breathless, redundant, monotonous bleating. Bird-song, indeed.
Why oh why has this feathered wraith not long since gone extinct, I have to wonder, gloating at the thought in the hour before coffee. A bird that is a weak flyer, with a pitiful excuse for a bill, short ineffective legs--and to make sure that natural selection wipes the species off the map after the first mating pair appear on the planet--they nest on the ground. "Come eat me! Come eat me!" they cry ceaselessly through the night, and yet, nothing does. All I can figure is that it is their horrid nagging pean repulses even housecats, who, after all, can tolerate just so much noisy intrusion into their very private worlds. Mice are much quieter. If these birds merely said "peep" or "chirp", they'd have been extirpated from phylogeny before that twig could branch into the goatsucker line--which was a bad idea from the git-go.
Oh. I'm sorry about this. I've had my coffee now. The W's have moved on up the valley now and can almost be ignored. I was just having a curmudgeonly moment. I'd be sorry to see these birds disappear from our valley, but I wouldn't be sorry if they were more fearful of human activity and habitation and kept their distance--a hundred feet or more would be nice. And as far as their "song" goes, I do sometimes wish they took requests.
Posted by fred1st at May 20, 2004 07:07 AM | TrackBackYou've got Whippoorwills, we've got Hadedas, Francolins or Guineafowl (season-dependent). In every corner of the planet there's at least one species of feathered beast whose job it is to make humans irritable before their coffee. It's a pity you don't get "Scare-Whippoorwills" as well as "ScareCrows".
Posted by: Michelle at May 20, 2004 10:12 AM
I love this! I just posted recently on the annoying mockingbirds, and frankly, "To Kill A..." I well can understand. But last month I was also going to verbally skewer and roast the whipporwill as well, and I'm so very glad that you did here. (Now bird lovers will have to get us with a spray of gunshot!) The song of the whipporwill is indeed, fine for about a minute, after which it gets exceedingly grating on the nerves. Lonesome sound? Not hardly.
Posted by: susan at May 20, 2004 12:26 PM