#whip-poor-will

Submitted for classification by @smoldragonpuppeteer

I felt so much alone;

The wide, dark world was round me,

And life was all unknown;

The hand of sorrow touched me,

And made my senses thrill

With all the pain that haunts the strain

Of mournful whip-poor-will.

"Whippoorwill! whippoorwill!”

By L. Lamar Wilson 

Excerpt from this story from Audubon:

The night of June 10 was warm, but not too much so. After days of rain, Concord, Massachusetts, wrung itself dry. The moon edged toward fullness. Rarely in need of an excuse to wander, Henry David Thoreau took it anyway. He followed Concord’s train tracks out of town and into a moonlit meadow. There, he encountered an iconic bird of the United States: the Eastern Whip-poor-will.

With their cryptic plumage and nocturnal habits, Eastern Whip-poor-wills are rarely seen, but the male’s loud, rhythmic songis hard to miss. Thoreau heard them that evening—five or six at once. A few nights later, when the moon was full, he encountered a dozen or more. “Perhaps this is the Whip-poor-will’s Moon,” he wrote in his journal in 1851.

Into the early 20th century, whip-poor-wills were sheer magic to those who inhabited their breeding range and awaited the species’ return each April and May. An important seasonal sign, the first whip-poor-will’s call signaled an end to frosts and marked the moment to plant sensitive crops, like corns and beans. Farmers let cattle out to pasture. Children knew they could play outside barefoot.

Quirkier and more personal rituals developed around their appearance. One could make a wish on his song, roll on the ground three times for a year without backpain, or shake a pocket full of coins for a year of financial success. Some people believed the repetitions of his name, which he can sing for many hours, predicted how many years they would live or, if they were unmarried, how many until they’d wed. In an article that circulated widely in 1941 and 1942, the United Press reported that an Alabama man—known to friends and family as “Uncle Rip”—waited to have one of his two annual haircuts until whip-poor-wills returned.

The whip-poor-wills’ tune was also part of the nation’s emotional landscape. To 19th century poets, whip-poor-wills might sound mournful, plaintive, and grieving. To John James Audubon, the “cheering voice” of the whip-poor-will was his “only companion” on nights alone in the woods. Others heard the sound of loneliness. When Hank Williams wanted to convey that emotion, he sang of a whip-poor-will who “sounds too blue to fly” in his often-covered 1949 classic, “I’m So Lonesome I Could Cry.”

Yet in the decades since Williams belted those classic opening lines, much has changed for the whip-poor-will—and for our own relationship with the species.

While many kinds of birds are experiencing population declines, whip-poor-wills are especially vulnerable to habitat loss, pesticide use, loss of prey, car strikes, and predation. Ornithologists estimate that the Eastern Whip-poor-will population decreased by nearly 70 percent between 1970 and 2014. But their decline may have begun sooner. After World War II, agricultural and suburban development swallowed great swaths of woodlands. As early as the 1950s, writers like Knoxville News-Sentinel’s Lucy Templeton, whose “A Country Calendar” often included reports and lore about whip-poor-wills, worried over their disappearance from local landscapes.

We’ve changed, too. Many people moved away from the rural towns where they grew up amid birdsong. In the suburbs that replaced bird habitats, we homogenized landscapes with decorative plants unwelcoming to whip-poor-wills. If whip-poor-wills seemed to abandon our world, we also abandoned theirs.

So. This week is a little different, just for fun! We’re going to get into the etymology of a group of birds, with a little bit of folklore mixed in, because I think it’s neat!

Since you are on the internet, you may be familiar with Caprimulgiformes. Well. That name is A Lot, so you probably don’t know them by that name, but they are an Order of birds that includes such internet sensations as Frogmouths and Nightjars and Whip-poor-wills. 

Another term for them is “Goat suckers”. 

Why? Let me explain:

The Order name “Caprimuliformes” can be broken into two basic parts:

Capra: (latin) “goat” (yes, like capricorn).

mulgeō: (latin) “I milk” 

Which, in turn, can be combined to create the word:

caprimulgus: (latin) “goat milker”. At some point, people started translating this as “goat sucker”, and I am not one to disagree, on account of it being a funnier name, in my correct opinion. 

This is not to be confused with another so-called goat-sucker: el chupacabra (Spanish: chupar, 'to suck', and cabras, 'goats'). I guess everyone is very worried about their goats getting-- actually, nevermind.

Caprimulgiformes are aerial insectivores, meaning they capture insects out of the air. In many parts of the world, people have noticed that they like to hang out around goats (and other herd animals, but lets focus on the goats). Why? Well, the real reason is because bugs are attracted to the goats, and these birds are attracted to the bugs. These birds also happen to be nocturnal.

Now, if these birds caught bugs during the day, they would probably have a different name, and this would likely be the end of the story. However, the fact that they appear at night, swooping low over the goat herds for mysterious reasons, is something that goat herders in ancient Greece apparently found to be very untrustworthy. 

You see, sometimes, nanny goats suddenly stop producing milk. This can happen for a variety of reasons, and these reasons are often not obvious. And when ancient goat herders discovered a goat suddenly wasn’t producing milk one morning, they, like all humans, want to know the reason.

So they thought to themselves: what could have happened since yesterday to cause this? What have I seen? What have I noticed?

And they remember those birds, which only appear at night, and swoop low over the heads of their goats for no discernible reason. And those goat herders thought to themselves: huh. Maybe they stole the milk. 

at least, this is how I imagine the reasoning went

This was likely not helped by the goatsuckers’ mouths, which look like this:

I suspect ancient Greek goat herders thought that looked about right for stealing goat milk. Like. It’s around the right size to fit around a goat teat. They’re actually like that because they’re essentially ram-feeders, meaning they open their mouth and fly through a swarm of insects, trying to catch as many as they can. Bigger mouth = more bugs.

At any rate, we know that people thought this, because this guy you may have heard of, Pliny the elder, passed on this little pearl of wisdom in 77 CE (quote from a 1601 translation):

“The Caprimulgi (so called of milking goats) [...] bee night-theeves; for all the day long they see not. Their manner is to come into the sheepeheards coats and goat-pens, and to the goats udders presently they goe, and suck the milke at their teats. And looke what udder is so milked, it giveth no more milke, but misliketh and falleth away afterwards, and the goats become blind withall.”

Dang. They also make goats go blind? Powerful little birds, I guess!

Nowadays, I’m not sure if anyone really believes this bit of folklore. Maybe it exists in small communities, but I don’t know of any. Even in 77 C.E., Pliny seemed a bit doubtful of this fact. In another bit of writing, where he recounts an old man telling him about the harms of goatsuckers, he ends the story with the line “But possibly that aged man was jesting with me.” (quote from Dictionary of American Bird Names).

(bonus: