I was five minutes late out the door, putting me at 5:50 AM on September 19. Sunrise wasn’t forecast for nearly another hour, but I could make out a faint glow oozing in from the east (though the general urban sky glow makes it hard to be sure). I swung my leg over my bicycle, stepped up onto the pedals, and off I went.
The moon, a bright and narrow crescent with the remainder of a faded disk above it, had already begun its voyage through the ecliptic. The brilliant silver Venus tagged along just below and to the right.
I was on my way to look for nighthawks in migration. Usually you go out to see them at dusk, but everything I read said that they fly at dawn too, and I’m an early riser.
Riding a bike through cool night air down nearly-empty streets is an absolute delight. There were cars on the road, but only a few of them, presumably setting off on long commutes, or on their way home after staying out late. As I approached Baltimore Avenue, an empty #34 trolley rattled by heading southwest. I turned to parallel the trolley tracks and then rode up Whitby past blocks and blocks of rowhouses. I finally reached the multiuse path along the Cobbs Creek Parkway. Down the long hill I mostly coasted, crossed Cobbs Creek, and arrived at the cemetery.
I looked up the hill and thought I could have filmed a horror movie right there. All I needed were a couple actors with torn up clothing to emerge from the rusty gates of the mausoleums and come lurching down the hill to make it perfect. Fog draped the headstones in the dark. The moisture in the air scattered the light from the crescent moon, giving it a hazier glow. The sky was midnight blue, but on the ground the palette was greenish gray, from the almost-black green of the grass amid the headstones to the frosted green of dew-soaked foxtail seed heads suspended above weedier patches.
But I wasn’t filming a horror movie. I was staking out the joint for birds that honestly are a little bit spooky on their own.
In the same way that horror movies have zombies or possessed humans move in a jerky, uncoordinated, not-quite-right gait, as if they are animated by supernatural forces that don’t ordinarily walk around on two feet, nighthawks don’t seem to fly quite right.
Of course the birds (unrelated to actual hawks such as red-tails) are quite accustomed to flying around on two wings, but those wings look a little too long and skinny (since you’re comparing them to similarly-sized actual raptors) and they tip, teeter, and dodge a little as they fly through the air. What is actually happening is that they’re seeing insects in mid air and adjusting course with incredible agility to snap them up, but from the ground where you can’t see the bugs, it all looks exactly the opposite: a bit uncoordinated or impaired. This is part of the fun of watching nighthawks.* The way they fly, they don’t seem like they should stay up in the air. You could suspect that they are held aloft by strings.
At the end of September I was driving back from a weekend in the mountains in north-central Pennsylvania on a rural two-lane road in the rich light of early evening. Just outside a small town, where the old brick houses transition to one-story garages and storefronts, I passed a flock of nighthawks feeding just above the rooftops and the fields out back, like some incredibly complex mobile.
That’s exactly what I had hoped to see in the cemetery, but I did not, so I strolled slowly up the misty slope, my toes getting wet from the dew, eying the glow creeping up the sky to the southeast towards the comparatively-fading moon and Venus.
A large bird flew overhead flapping enormous wings. It wasn’t a nighthawk but a great blue heron heading towards the creek. Against the background of crickets I could hear other birds starting to wake up with tiny, high-pitched chips from inside the trees and bushes where they had taken shelter to sleep through the night. A cat bird or a mockingbird repeated a harsh scolding call in erratic bursts that sounded like a shorting powerline. A flock of crows woke up in the distance with a chorus of caws.
Color faded into the world as I went. Shades of green and brown distinguished themselves around me. In the sky the sky glow was starting to look like a proper dawn in pink and peach, silhouetting the trees to the southeast. Still no nighthawks. The moon was just a thin rim of light. I couldn’t find Venus anymore.
Realizing I didn’t have long before I had to hop on my bike and ride home to help get the kids up and out of the house, I decided to stroll a little further up the hill to see if I could spot any deer. You could call it giving up, but I figured I’d make the most out of finding myself in a beautiful cemetery on a beautiful morning.
Over the twenty or so years since I started frequenting the cemetery looking for snakes, a group of volunteers has done a fabulous job cleaning the place up. Gone are acres of thick meadow and stands of weeds that had engulfed most of the gravestones. But they have left a lot of the opportunistic trees that have grown up over the years, which has the effect of creating a savanna. Mowed grass is shaded by scattered black walnuts, white mulberries, red maples, catalpas, and assorted other trees. A couple plots have been surrendered, at least for the time being, to stands of sassafras, about twenty feet high and all the trunks six to eight inches thick and not quite straight.
The sky was pretty much blue at this point, and I couldn’t find the moon or Venus anymore. The world was all the usual colors again, and a constant stream of traffic drove past on Cobbs Creek Parkway below me.
Well, it’s time to give up, I said to myself. Sometimes you get skunked.
But, as I looked towards the parkway and gave a moment of thought to which path to take back down the hill, a bird, about the size of a blue jay, with greyish-brown patterned plumage and long, thin wings sporting one white patch each, crossed the open sky between the trees to my right and to my left.
I had to laugh. I had seen it for all of two seconds. I hadn’t seen it doing its thing of hawking bugs out of the air, but I had, undeniably, seen a nighthawk.
*It’s also really fun to bid bon voyage to birds making their way to central South America and that, in the process, connect us with ecosystems, landscapes, and people half a world away.