Nature Notes: No Whippoorwills
Monday night was delicious. It was quiet and as late as 9 objects big and small could still be discerned with the naked eye without the addition of artificial lighting. It was a perfect night to go out and scour the woods and fields for whippoorwills, without leaving the driving seat of my vehicle. So that’s what I did.
I scoured the back roads of Noyac, Bridgehampton, and Water Mill, stopping by fields and woodlands. From 8:10 to 10:07 I drove along, stopping and listening for up to five minutes at 25 different stops along Old Sag Harbor Road, Millstone Road, Noyac Path, Guyer Road, Deerfield Road, and Deer Run.
For the first 40 or 50 minutes I could see fairly well. I stopped alongside a pastoral setting on Old Sag Harbor Road and could see a female deer sitting in a field of tall grasses looking my way from 300 yards away. At the same stop I heard the crows gathering at roosts, among them a few that were either fish crows or just fledged common crows uttering their nasal caws.
A stop beyond and what did I hear? Male gray tree frogs uttering their soft tremolos. Aha, I remembered, we had almost an inch of rain on Saturday, enough to create vernal ponds in depressions, the kind of breeding habitats that spring peepers, wood frogs, and gray tree frogs prefer. Vernal ponds are transient and do not have fish or other organisms that could prey on the eggs and tadpoles of those amphibians.
A few doors down the road, the woods were lush and the light failing. It was 9 and a wood thrush was still singing its territorial song, the beautiful strains of an avian organ at dusk, but still no guttural fast repeated whippoorwill-whippoorwill-whippoorwill outbursts. Neither did I see any flying and hunting over the open fields adjacent to woodlands where they make their nests during my listening stops.
What was that? A tiny dot of light caught my eye. Yes, a firefly, the first of the season for me. Indeed, as I crept along at 30 miles per hour I saw more and more of them. They were not yet peaking but they were lighting up at least 15 of my 25 stops.
Noyac Path was particularly intriguing — several tree frogs trilling, fireflies sparking, the first quarter moon overhead unobstructed by clouds. A bit to the east, Venus shined brightly as well. I am reminded that I have explored the heavens for years and need to get back to astronomy before I forget all that I know about it, however fleeting. I’ll never understand the Big Bang theory.
If the absence of any whippoorwills was disappointing, I was prepared for that finding. But what was really distressing was how lighted up the woods were, not by fireflies, but by houses and their driveways. As I drove along Deerfield Road past what I call Farrell Town I almost had to shield my eyes; the number of lights and their intensity was enough to blind one who had become perfectly dark-adapted during the first 20 stops. No chance of a whippoorwill here with all that light, I thought.
Even the flickerings of the fireflies were overshadowed by the galleries of incandescent lights. Deerfield Road doesn’t have street lighting, it has McMansion lighting.
“I’ll try one last stop,” I said to myself, and pulled off onto Deer Run, a Deerfield offshoot that is adjacent to the line of steel high-tension powerline towers on their way to Sag Harbor and points east. Absolute silence!
I pulled out of Deer Run and 100 yards to the north was a freshly killed fawn lying in the middle of Deerfield Road. Oh, yes, there were plenty of speeding cars and a helicopter or two overhead to remind me that the Hamptons, while not having yet attained the close-knit 24-hour-a-day suburban life of Nassau and western Suffolk, are nevertheless well into the 21st century.
Yes, not a single whippoorwill to behold, but over all, it was a wonderful adventure, the positive aspects still outweighed the negative ones, and I resolved to continue my environmental ways, nonetheless.
Larry Penny can be reached via email at [email protected].