Hear That Lonesome Whippoorwill

Yesterday afternoon I took my bike and a couple of trail  cameras, and headed off to the woods to start looking for one of those elusive bucks that I never seem to find. After riding a couple of miles I ditched the bike and hiked along a ridgeline to where the ridge suddenly dropped off down to a little bench. A wet weather spring trickled off to the side which kind of created a hot spot for getting deer pictures and all kinds of critters for that matter. I walked rather slowly as this was in the heart, or maybe it was the heart of timber rattlesnake country. As I neared the bench, I heard the loud, screaming “keeeyerr” of what I think was a red tailed hawk. I caught a glimpse of a gliding hawk through the trees and kept hearing another one in a tree down below. I assumed that they had a nest down there, but once the hawk saw me everything got quiet and I couldn't locate the nest. 

The good news was that I didn't get bit by a snake.

I'm not sure why so many people are fascinated by birds, but we are. And so we watch them, feed them, and put apps on our phones to help us identify them. Since I didn't get bit by a snake and I'm starting to lose some of you due to the boredom of my story, I’d best be writing something a little more dramatic. Since we're already talking about birds, I'll stick with the subject. Just to let you know up front, even though you may not be a bird lover, you might find this bird story interesting.

When I bought the land here in the late nineties, or as my kids would say, back in the nineteen hundreds, it was a freshly timbered thicket. There were trees, just not many big ones. The bigger trees that were there, especially the ones by the entrance, seemed to be tangled up in wild grape vines. It was a wildlife honey hole. I didn't realize it at first, but after camping there one evening, I discovered that amongst the homes of other creatures, it was also the home of a whippoorwill. 

Now everyone just loves whippoorwills! The pretty “whippoorwill, whippoorwill” call that trills on and on just after dark or in the early pre-dawn. Sometimes, when the moon is bright, you might hear them throughout the night. Hank Williams even wrote a song about them! “Hear that lonesome whippoorwill, he sounds to blue to fly,….”

I liked the song but I'd really only ever heard a whippoorwill once or twice prior to hearing them on my land. But Grandma often talked about how when she was growing up on Mt Davis, she would hear the whippoorwill, and it was such a beautiful thing. At the age of ninety nine she hadn't heard a whippoorwill in over fifty years. So my uncle Don and I took her up to my property. We sat by the road and listened, and sure enough, way off in the distance we heard a whippoorwill. But Grandma couldn't hear it. So we did what men do best. We made accommodations. Even though Grandma could still get around on her own, we thought it best to put her in a wheelchair and push her down through the rough terrain to get closer to the whippoorwill. The whippoorwill must have heard us coming because it got silent. But that wasn't a problem. It was a beautiful night and so we sat and waited. Sure enough, “whippoorwill, whippoorwill,” it started whistling again. But this time it was up by the van. Grandma was able to hear it faintly. We headed back up to the van. We sat for a bit but I don't think we heard it after that. 

Having the rare bird on my land was exciting! I loved it. Hearing them in the morning while waiting for a turkey to gobble, or in the evening sitting by the fire, something about their call would just put me in a wildernessy mood. Since I was helping with a boy scout troop back in the day, I suggested that we go camping there. We could chop down trees and build shelters or whatever. Things that aren’t allowed on public land. So we camped there one weekend, the boy scouts each setting up their own little camp. We gathered around the fire before calling it a night, with the boys telling their scary ghost stories and whatnot and listening to the night sounds and the whippoorwill. After that we headed to our shelters. When you're not used to sleeping in the wilderness, it can be hard to fall asleep, especially after hearing ghost stories . Not being able to sleep can drive you practically nuts. At 2:00 a.m. I was startled awake by one of the boys hollering as loud as he could, “shut up”! He'd had it! That whippoorwill wasn't sounding so beautiful anymore, and the poor kid just couldn't fall asleep.

Legend has it that Jenelle's grandpap  shot a whippoorwill off the roof of his barn. It's hard to imagine. He was such a nice and quiet guy that worked hard as a coal miner and a sawmiller to provide for his wagon load of kids. Thirteen to be exact! Maybe with all of those kids, the whippoorwill was just about to push him over the edge, and so he took it out on the poor bird. Who knows! Either way, how could such a nice guy do something like that?

Somewhere along the line I met Jenelle and we got married and built our little house on the property! We like it here, kind of tucked away out in the middle of nowhere. We try to keep our property rough and wildlife friendly. There are things that we can control and things we can't. Every summer we share our world with the whippoorwills. For whatever reason they come back to our property. Maybe it's the magic in the place or maybe it's the brush piles that we build, I don't know? 

We often have friends over as well. It's neat when someone hears a whippoorwill for the very first time! “What's that”! Or, “did you hear that”? It is neat, but for us, we've heard them almost every night throughout the spring and summer, for the last twenty some years. And almost every morning, around four or four thirty, the whippoorwill lands on the roof beside the chimney, and starts his song. I jump up and slam the window shut. It helps a little. But sometimes when the moon is bright, he'll whistle all night long. I've gone out on the deck and thrown my hat at him only to have him fly to the other side of the roof. I'll make noise and try to shoo him away. But by then I'm wide awake and it's hard to fall asleep. And it's been twenty some years!

So I lay in bed pondering about life and thinking about some of life's lessons that I’ve been learning.

There is such a thing as too much of a good thing.

It's neat that there is something about our property that makes the whippoorwill call this place his home.

And after a lot of thinking and a lot of pondering and listening to what seems to have been a thousand “whippoorwill, whippoorwills”,  I'm pretty certain that Jenelle's grandpap wasn't falling off of his rocker either!

And whether you’re a bird, a bird lover, or none of the above, I’m thankful that we all have our little spot in the world that we can call home!