Nighthawks are Spooky Birds
/In the North we see them in summer, in small flocks flying at dusk and dawn: nighthawks seining the air for insects. The birds are sooty gray. White bandage-like markings on their long narrow wings flash as they swoop and stunt.
Nighthawks’ calls are short and nasal. Thoreau thought it sounded like they were “squeaking” and remarked in his journal on the birds’ “peculiar flitting, limping kind of flight.” The male nighthawk also has an intriguing courtship or territorial flight: He dives toward the ground, then pulls up suddenly so that his wings produce what one modern field guide calls “a humming, whooshing hoooov.” You feel the sound in your chest as much as you hear it with your ears.
credit: Wikimedia Commons
Nighthawks don’t build nests. The female lays a couple of eggs on a patch of sand or gravel. Growing up in State College, Pennsylvania, I saw many nighthawks. Probably they found attractive nesting sites on the flat graveled roofs of buildings, including those at nearby Penn State University. On those long-ago summer evenings, I remember watching nighthawks course back and forth above the town, dipping and darting, interweaving in their flight, somehow missing one another as they pursued their insect prey.
Pennsylvania Dutch folk call the bird a nachteil, which translates as night owl. The English common name suggests it’s a hawk. But a nighthawk is neither a hawk nor an owl – it belongs to a group known as the “goatsuckers,” because in times past people thought such birds flew into barns at night and sucked the teats of goats to steal milk. No truth to that belief, though the birds’ big broad mouths (for scooping insects out of the air) make them appear capable of such acts.
I always thought nighthawks were spooky birds. Maybe that’s why I decided that a character in Nighthawk’s Wing, Rebecca Kreidler, should see a phantom nighthawk as perhaps the symbol of a stillborn child she lost following an assault by her abusive husband when she was pregnant.
I won’t reveal any spoilers about how nighthawks, real or imaginary, help guide the course of this second Gideon Stoltz mystery. But both of my main characters, Gideon and his wife, True, receive visitations from such birds.
Image courtesy of John James Audubon Center at Mill Grove, PA; Montgomery County Audubon Collection; and Zebra Publishing