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Updated: May 3, 2025
Usually it is not until the gold begins to pass that I notice the nighthawk, though he may have been circling and crying "peent, peent" all the afternoon. If you can catch sight of him before the light fades too much you will see the white bar which crosses each wing beneath and looks exactly like a hole, as if the bird had transparencies in his pinions as has the polyphemus moth.
The formalities of courtship are, however, quite another thing, and the execution of interesting aerial dances entails much effort and time. It is in the dusk of evening that the male woodcock begins his song, plaintive notes uttered at regular intervals, and sounding like peent! peent! Then without warning he launches himself on a sharply ascending spiral, his wings whistling through the gloom.
And besides, he thought his voice sounded better on water than it did on land. Quite often, during the nightly concerts in which Chirpy Cricket took part, he had noticed an odd cry, Peent! Peent! which seemed to come from the woods. And sometimes there followed from the same direction a hollow, booming sound, as if somebody were amusing himself by blowing across the bung-hole of an empty barrel.
Mounting by easy stages of half a dozen rapid strokes, catching flies by the way, and crying peent-peent, the acrobat climbs until I look a mere lump on the roof; then ceasing his whimpering peent, he turns on bowed wings and falls shoots roofward with fearful speed. The chimneys! Quick! Quick he is.
He spent much of his time listening for Mr. Nighthawk's Peent! Peent! which now and then came faintly across the meadow, and the dull, muffled boom that often followed. While Chirpy waited for the moon to grow full, one night an odd thing happened. The stars twinkled overhead. There wasn't a cloud in the sky.
Again and again the familiar voice of the song sparrow came from the dark shore of Asamuk, or the field sparrow trilled from the top of some cedar, occasionally the painted one, Aunakeu, the partridge, drummed in the upper woods, and nightly there was the persistent chant of Muckawis, the whippoorwill, the myriad voices of the little frogs called spring-peepers, and the peculiar, "peent, peent," from the sky, followed by a twittering, that Quonab told him was the love song of the swamp bird the big snipe, with the fantail and long, soft bill, and eyes like a deer.
He had thought it was thunder that he had just heard. But it was Mr. Nighthawk, making that odd, booming sound of his. It was ever so much louder than Chirpy had supposed it could be. He had never heard it so near before. For a moment Chirpy thought that perhaps Kiddie Katydid didn't know what he was talking about. But no! There was Mr. Nighthawk's well-known call, Peent! Peent!
He half shut them to his body and dived head foremost on a perilous slant. Then, just as he must be dashed to pieces on the gray rock of the ledge on which I sat, he spread them wide, caught the air that sang through the wide-spread primaries with a clear, deep-toned note, and rose again; and in his "peent, peent" was a quaint note of self-satisfaction and self-praise.
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