​Bird Profile: The Eastern Whip-poor-will

Photo by Dan Vickers

By Steve Phenicie
 
Whip-poor-wills aren’t always terribly popular with the sleeping bag crowd at campgrounds. Sure, their bucolic calls are a pleasure to hear while sitting around the campfire, but when they are still “whip-poor-willing” long after it’s time for some shuteye, well …
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A patient observer once counted 1,088 “whip-poor-wills” in rapid succession. After a night of delivering its trademark call, the bird sleeps on the forest floor or on a horizontal log or branch during the day. You’re unlikely to detect one, however, because they prefer to sit motionless.
 
Whip-poor-wills are a mottled brown-gray overall with black flecking, a reddish tinge on rounded wings, a black throat, and a long, rounded tail. They measure nine or 10 inches long and prefer open deciduous and pine woodlands, often along forest edges. They don’t build nests but often lay their eggs, typically a clutch of two, in leaf or pine litter along the edge of a clearing under herbaceous plan growth. For food, they catch large, night-flying insects in flight – mostly moths, beetles, and mosquitoes.
 
The bird is a common summer breeding resident in the northern part of Georgia, although it can also be found farther south. Overall, they breed throughout the eastern half of the U.S. north of the Peach State as well as in southern Canada. Many spend the winter in the Southeast, in areas where Chuck-will's-widows are resident in summer. Others migrate to Central America and Mexico; a few show up in the Caribbean.
 
Their numbers appear to have decreased over much of their range in recent decades. The reasons are not well understood, but one possibility is a general reduction in the numbers of large moths and beetles. Open-understory forests, which they like, are also being lost as forest is converted to crops, pasture, or urbanization, and fire suppression leads to dense understories. Also, because whip-poor-wills often fly over roads or sit on roadways while foraging, they are vulnerable to collisions with cars. 
 
Some cool facts about whip-poor-wills:

• They lay their eggs to line up with the lunar cycle, so that they hatch on average 10 days before a full moon. When the moon is near full, the adults can forage the entire night and capture large quantities of insects to feed to the nestlings.
• Nestlings move around, making it difficult for predators to rob the nest. The parent may help by shoving a nestling aside with its foot, sometimes sending the young bird tumbling head over heels.
• The male adult will often will investigate intruders near the nest by hovering in place with his body nearly vertical and his tail spread wide, showing off the broad white tips of the tail feathers.
• Eastern and Mexican Whip-poor-wills used to be considered one species, simply called the Whip-poor-will. But in 2011 they were split into two species based on differences in mitochondrial and nuclear DNA. Eastern Whip-poor-wills give faster, higher-pitched whip-poor-will calls and have more colorful eggs than their western counterparts.
• The Whip-poor-will may locate insects by seeing the bugs’ silhouettes against the sky. Its eyes have a reflective structure behind the retina that is probably an adaptation to low light conditions.
• In the wild, Eastern Whip-poor-wills have been known to live 13 to 15 years.

 

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