Sat AUDUBON BULLETIN 
Published Quarterly by the 
meee OLS. AUDUBON SOCLET Y 
2001 NORTH CLARK STREET, CHICAGO, ILLINOIS 
Number 44 December, 1942 
Nesting Notes on the 
Whip-poor-will and Nighthawk 
By VERNA R. JOHNSTON 
ON MAy 8, 1942, I set out on a field trip along the Sangamon River near 
Cerro Gordo, Illinois, (14 miles northeast of Decatur) and chanced to dis- 
cover a whip-poor-will’s nest. I send these notes on it for whatever inter- 
esting data they may contain. 
The nest was located thirty feet inside a forested area, amid osage 
orange trees, gooseberry and hazelnut shrubs. It contained two white eggs 
with a few brown spots, laid on some leaves on the ground, not even a 
depression apparent. The female flushed when I approached within six feet, 
her buffy tail feathers spread as she silently flew to a slanting tree trunk 
fifteen feet away and sat watching me. She rested on the tree in a position 
parallel to the trunk, not crosswise as most birds do. When incubating, 
she sat in such a position that she resembled perfectly an extension of a 
log which lay on the ground a few inches from the nest. If I came right 
up to the nest, she flew low out of sight into the brush farther away. At 
no time did the bird make any sound or show anything other than timidity 
on my intrusion of her nesting territory. I saw only the female on or 
around the nest. 
These observations were of special interest to me because I had watched 
a Howell’s nighthawk nest in the Colorado Rockies in the summer of 1941, 
and was eager to compare the nesting of these related birds. The night- 
hawk’s nest was located in an open spot of an aspen-lodgepole pine forest 
and consisted of a mere depression in the sandy, rocky soil, two eggs 
present on July 9. The eggs were much darker than the whip-poor-will’s, 
being gray with heavy black splotches. They blended in perfectly with the 
background and were next to impossible to find when the bird was off the 
nest. Even when a parent was incubating and I knew almost the exact 
location of the nest, I was forced to focus my eyes sharply on the spot for 
a few seconds before I could separate the bird from its background. 
On July 11 the eggs hatched and after that the nighthawk did not 
move until I came within three feet of the nest; then it did not fly at once 
but opened its mouth and gave a hissing sound, the wide gape making it 
look quite fierce. As I kept coming very slowly, it finally flushed, and, still 
hissing, half dragged one wing as it fiuttered and floundered a few feet 
away, appearing to urge me to follow. When I did not follow, it zigzagged 
eas: 
