The Phantom of Carp Ridge
May 27th, 2014

In the wee hours of the morning today, I drove out to Carp Ridge for the nocturnal festival.

There are three nocturnal specialties there. One is the nighthawks. In spring male nighthawks perform spectacular aerial dives to impress their prospective mates. The most spectacular part is the sound: when they dive the wind whooshes through their wings with a *zoom*. I think I have described the sound before as like a tiny sportscar whizzing past your ear. But that's how it sounds when there's still light in the sky. By night they get bolder, and it's more like a full-size fighter jet whizzing past your ear.

The aerial dance of the woodcocks is the second attraction. While the nighthawks "peent" from the sky, woodcocks "peent" as they strut on the ground, then finally they take off with a twittering of wings, circling overhead. The twittering changes to chirping as they descend, finally landing in exactly the same spot on the same rocky clearing as before. On a warm spring night Carp Ridge is alive with these sounds, nasal "peent"s, sudden *zoom*s, and a twittering that seems to come from all directions (and that if you didn't know better, you'd probably assume was bats.) It must be experienced to be believed.

But the star attractions, the ones that haunt me, are the whippoorwills. For seven years I've sought them. Last spring I heard one for the first time since childhood. But to see one is a great deal harder. There's already little light left in the sky when they first start to sing, distantly, from the woods. By the time they make their way out to the roadsides it's almost dusk. Time after time I'd listen to the breathlessly repeated "whip-poorWEEL! whip-poorWEEL! whip-poorWEEL!" while struggling to see the bird that sounded like it was only just past the shoulder, less than ten feet away, and, if field guides are to be believed, perched in the open on a rocky shelf or on the ground. And I'd never see it.

I told my husband that they seemed to have both powers of invisibility and powers of teleportation. Both were necessary to explain it. Because eventually the whippoorwill would stop singing, and then I would immediately hear it singing from down the road, without having seen or heard any sign of its flight. (I think I've cleared that mystery up, though. Because two whippoorwills singing at once is not a harmony but a cacophony, they seem to have come to a gentlemen's agreement that only one in a given area shall sing at a time. So once one bird finally runs out of breath, the next one starts up.)

Last night (or this morning, it gets fuzzy at 4am), I finally discovered the secret: eye shine. You don't have to point the flashlight right at them, and of course you shouldn't! (Just point one at your own eyes for a moment and imagine what that could do to a nocturnal bird.) Shine it on the road nearby. Mild indirect light doesn't seem to bother them, indeed they don't even seem to notice it. But their eye will catch the light and glow, a perfectly outlined orange circle, looming large. Even through a dense thicket you can see it. It's downright eerie, actually--especially when that glowing circle shifts, then dances away. It gives me a fresh appreciation for the superstitious folklore that once surrounded these birds.

Time and again I saw the eyeshine. A few times I saw the brief outline of a wing when it flew. And while it was still too dark for me to get the proper view I had always hoped for, I began to feel that there was something more proper, more true, more essentially whippoorwill about this phantom figure with a glowing eye, than if I had seen the body and the plumage.

Be that as it may, I did finally get what I'd always hoped for. In the first light of dawn at quarter to five, I saw one clearly. By some optical illusion it loomed large in my binoculars, looking much more imposing than the nine and a half inches I was given to expect, but there was no doubt what it was. It was more than a silhouette. I could see its brown and gray plumage, and how seamlessly it blended in to the lichen-encrusted rock. It had been calling softly before, but now that my sights were on it, it was completely silent and still.

I looked away for a moment to swat mosquitos. When I looked back, it was gone.

Marsh Slinkers ←

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