EASTERN WHIPPOORWILL 179 



from the city of Boston, Mass., for example, as well as within a mile 

 or two of many small towns in the State, the bird is still abundant, 

 nesting on the dry wooded ridges and eskers. 



This ability to flourish as man advanced into the country, when 

 so many birds failed to hold their own, may be accounted for by 

 the habits and equipment of the whippoorwill, which, when it moves 

 about, is "bescreened in night" and is so obscurely colored that we 

 may say "the mask of night is on its face" even in the daytime, as it 

 lies motionless on a carpet of dead leaves. 



If the bird should be discovered and attacked, we may imagine 

 how often the whippoorwill, with its marvelous powers of flight, may 

 escape hawk, owl, or fox. 



Fall. — We rarely see whippoorwills in autumn, but as we hear 

 them sing not infrequently at this season we know that they some- 

 times linger in New England almost to the end of September, a 

 time when hard frosts are at hand, which will either kill the insects 

 or hasten them into retirement. 



Taverner and Swales (1907) report an unusual gathering of whip- 

 poorwills on Point Pelee, Ontario. They say : "In our various Sep- 

 tember visits we have usually found them more or less common, but 

 at that season they are much quieter, and seldom do more than call 

 a few times in the early evening and then cease. Sometimes one 

 will be heard again through the night, but more often not. Sep- 

 tember, 1905, beginning the 4th, we saw from one to six until the 

 13th, when a great flight of them appeared on the Point. Thab 

 day, in the red cedar thickets near the extremity of the Point, we 

 flushed thirty between twelve and half-past one in the afternoon." 



'Winter. — George Nelson, who has known the wliippoorwill for 

 years in its winter quarters on the east coast of Florida, tells me 

 that the bird is pretty evenly distributed in the country about 

 Sebastian, frequenting chiefly the ridges and hammocks where, dur- 

 ing the day, it rests on the ground or on the trunk of a fallen tree. 

 Not infrequently, as Mr. Nelson has been driving after dark along 

 U. S. Route 1, a bird has started up from almost beneath the wheels 

 of his car and has flown off in the glare of the headlights. He says 

 that the bird is not in song during winter, but just before it starts 

 northward, late in March, it sings for a few evenings, and that its 

 departure invariably coincides with the arrival of the chuck-will's- 

 widow. 



Each evening during my stay at Sebastian with Mr. Nelson in 

 mid-February 1931, just as it was beginning to grow dark, a whip- 

 poorwill appeared in the dooryard, a clearing in a dense hammock 

 on the shore of the Indian River. The bird perched lengthwise 

 here and there on the thick limbs of a live oak, well up in the big 



