Subject: [Tweeters] A "Nighthawk Circus"
Date: Jun 30 13:29:00 2005
From: Paul Webster - paul.webster at comcast.net


Among the reports about the return of Common Nighthawks to the skies of Washington, Mary Hrudkaj's nice description of them feeding around her hilltop home reminded me of this short description of a "Nighthawk Circus" in a book by Edwin Way Teale, a naturalist who flourished a generation ago. "Circus" here isn't a show with animals in a tent -- it has the original Latin meaning of a ring or circle.



"Where, to the north, the Starfield swells to its highest point, we call the elevated ground Nighthawk Hill. This name commemorates a rare adventure of ours in the sunset of one of our earliest years at Trail Wood. Toward the end of an August day, we had emerged from the woods and were starting across the meadow when I glanced up. Overhead, like an apparition of beauty in the sky, a great wheel or funnel of birds - more than sixty, gray, slim-winged, with silvery-white patches that shone in the tinted rays of the sunset - was turning without a sound. We threw our-selves down on the ground, warm at the end of that sultry day, and, lying on our backs, looked up at the buoyant, lightly loaded birds, at this aerial whirlpool of wings revolving above us. We saw the wheel of streamlined bodies, of graceful wings, turning against the delicate background of high feathery cirrus clouds flushed with pink in the sunset light.



"More than once we had seen broad-winged hawks on migration wheeling in this manner. But this was our first encounter with a "night-hawk circus." For fully a quarter of an hour the whirling birds turned in unison above our pasture fields. Then they drifted slowly away toward the south. Since that August day, we have seen many nighthawks veering over the Trail Wood meadows but never again that revolving wheel of life turning so close above us. Once and only once, only on Nighthawk Hill, have we been so fortunate.



"I remember hearing of a New England farmer who had the luck to witness the spectacle of a nighthawk circus over his land. The one thing he recalled most vividly was that the whirling vortex had come so low he had been able to knock down some of the birds with a stick. How far back in history runs this vicious thread! As in a reflex action, like the cat that cannot resist pouncing on a string drawn before it, certain men in every age have responded by hitting, maiming, killing every wild creature that has come close."



-- from Edwin Way Teale: A Naturalist Buys an Old Farm, Dodd, Meade & Company, Inc., 1974



Paul Webster

Seattle

paul.websterATcomcast.net