Common Nighthawk, Chordeiles minor
I learned to bird on the Hudson River. As a student at Bard College in the mid-Hudson Valley, I would wake up hours earlier than my peers, everyday, and spend my time before classes in the Tivoli Bays wetland right behind the college. Some of my closest friends became Great Blue Herons, Yellow Warblers, and Red-winged Blackbirds. No matter where I have traveled to since graduating, I feel myself called back to the Tivoli Bays when I need to feel that sense of familiarity, a sense of home.
This spring, for the first time in my entire life, I was unable to spend even a day of spring in New York. I was stuck in quarantine in Hoonah, Alaska, a place that is an entirely different world than that of the Hudson Valley. My annual pilgrimage to the Tivoli Bays during spring migration was impossible due to COVID-19, and the feeling of separation hurt. Time seemed to function differently this year- without spring migration in the Tivoli Bays, I could barely tell that it was spring at all, and then suddenly, it was summer, and now, it is almost fall. I had been seeing birds I normally see way earlier - American Goldfinch, blackbirds, Tufted Titmice, House Wrens- for the first time this year, and it felt wildly disorienting. Becoming a birder in New York had imprinted the migration patterns of the area into my being, and I have come to expect specific birds at specific times the same way in which I expect Valentine’s Day in February, Christmas in December. Seeing my first goldfinch in August made me feel as strange as though I were walking around with a Santa hat in June.
From the seat of a kayak, I floated along the Hudson River, breathing in the smell of marshy grasses and estuarine salt. Hearing the rustle of grasses in the Tivoli Bays felt like a soothing lullaby welcoming me home.
As the sky melted into the colors of a Hudson Valley Sunset, purple washed away the blue and thin rose light crept up above the mountains. There is nothing quite like a Hudson Valley sunset. The plants and shorebirds that dotted the river lost their color, becoming black silhouettes. Suddenly, a dark shape flew towards me, jerking upwards to avoid colliding with my head, and as I whipped around to watch the batlike shape I could see the white windows in the wings shining within the silhouette of a Common Nighthawk. It flew in front of the moon, creating an x-shape with its boomerang-like wings before veering off into the shadows. Looking around, I could count four nighthawks dipping and dancing as they feasted on insects above the river.
A Common Nighthawk perched at Magee Marsh during the Biggest Week in American Birding. It was incredible how well it blended in to its surroundings!
Common Nighthawks are members of the nightjar family caprimulgiformes (which is a really fun word to say!) Their wings are long and slender like a falcons, which they expertly deploy to twist and turn in the air like a bat while hunting insects in flight. Nightjars are nocturnal, and because of their excellent camouflage are almost impossible to see during the day while they rest completely still against tree limbs. Unlike most nightjars, nighthawks lack conspicuous rictal bristles on their face that are believed to possibly help with the capture of insects.
Common Nighthawks begin to migrate through the Hudson River at the end of August. Unlike every other bird, I was seeing them for the first time on-time. It made time feel right again, as though everything was on schedule after all, even though it had, of course, been on time all along. With all of the chaos and uncertainty in the human world, I felt grateful to the nighthawks for this moment of normalcy, and for what felt like a homecoming party.
