There’s Some Spooky Lore Surrounding The Elusive Whippoorwill, And They’re Often Seen As Omens Of Death And Decline
Across the eastern United States and parts of Canada, the whippoorwill flies around deciduous forests, catching moths, beetles, and insects each night. Their beaks may be small, but they are skilled at snatching bugs mid-air.
Whippoorwills are a member of the nocturnal nightjar family. They are most active at dawn and dusk.
The bird’s name comes from their shrill, haunting call. There is some spooky lore surrounding the elusive species.
They appear in Indigenous, European, and American folklore as omens of death or misfortune. A whippoorwill singing outside of a home meant that someone would die soon.
The Mohegan tribe believed that magical forest dwellers could transform into whippoorwills to travel through the woods.
They also had the power to make themselves invisible. For the most part, they were benevolent nature spirits but could become dangerous if disrespected.
In addition, the Mohegan word for whippoorwill translated to “small boy.” In this tribe, young boys were associated with the transitional state between life and death, with the community also experiencing a high rate of child mortality.
In the 19th and 20th centuries, many writers, like Henry David Thoreau and Susan Fenimore Cooper, incorporated mentions of ill omens in nature into their work.
The best-known reference to whippoorwills is in H.P. Lovecraft’s novella The Dunwich Horror. The writer mentioned whippoorwills in his story nearly two dozen times.
Verbbaitum – stock.adobe.com – illustrative purposes only – pictured above a whippoorwill sits on a fence
The birds would show up around the deaths of the Whateley family, who lived in the fictional town of Dunwich, Massachusetts.
The whippoorwills were essential to the plot, but they were replaced by great horned owls in the 1970 film adaptation of Lovecraft’s novella.
The replacement is an example of the whippoorwill’s erasure from American horror and culture altogether.
The bird’s cultural erasure reflects their actual decline. Since the 1970s, eastern whippoorwill populations are estimated to have dropped by about 70 percent.
According to the naturalist Robert Michael Pyle, the decline of a species means that people will have fewer encounters with it and, therefore, be unfamiliar with it.
Whippoorwills are vulnerable to habitat loss, limited food sources, pesticide use, car collisions, and predation from cats and raccoons.
More than half of their diet consists of moths, so the decline of moth populations from pesticides has really affected them. Agricultural and suburban development have also taken over the woodlands they inhabit.
They are listed as “near threatened” on the IUCN’s Red List. As climate change worsens, the birds face many of the same threats as others, including extreme weather events like forest fires, increased rainfall, and heat waves.
However, there is hope for their conservation. Whippoorwills seem to respond well to forest management practices involving the creation of diverse forests with a mix of older and younger trees. Conservation efforts are being upheld in many of their breeding areas as well.
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