Laura Erickson's For the Birds

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One of the delightful things about a puppy is taking it to puppy socialization class, or puppy kindergarten. And the funnest part of puppy class is the obstacle course. Watching eight little puppies walking over the rungs of a ladder and climbing up stairs and sliding down a slide and riding a cart is about as silly and fun a sight as you could want. On Photon’s graduation night, only one thing could draw my eyes away from all that excitement—a flight of nighthawks.

I probably wouldn’t have even noticed them coursing over except that one of them was calling. The moment I heard that familiar peent, up went my eyes to a loose flock wending their way through the early evening sky, Nighthawks flutter and soar in erratic, butterfly fashion, and the flock of 18 made a lovely picture against the soft pink clouds in the fading blue sky.

Migrating nighthawks are one of the best perks of living on the north shore of Lake Superior. When hundreds of thousands of birds are moving from North to South America every fall, chances are a flock or two will eventually pass over just about any place on the continent. But the nighthawks that find their way anywhere along the Lake Superior shoreline won’t cross the big lake, so they follow the shore all the way along until they reach the end, right here in Duluth. I can count on several decent flights every August, and an occasional spectacular flight. On August 26, 1990, Mike Hendrickson counted an amazing 43,690 in a two-and-a-half hour period along the shoreline., and I’ve counted thousands per hour a mile inland along Peabody Street in Duluth.

These migration flights take place when insects fill the evening air, so the nighthawks hunt as they fly. Their huge eyes spot insects ahead of them, and the way they dart and weave as they chase them is a study in grace and style. Nighthawks are only 9 inches long and weigh only two or three ounces, yet have almost a two-foot wingspan, and the delicately narrow, pointed shape of the wings accentuates this length.

Nighthawks eat any insects they can catch on the wing, but by far the majority are emergent aquatic insects such as dragonflies and mosquitoes. So nighthawk numbers depend absolutely on the quality of lakes and streams, and decline in the face of mosquito abatement projects, which use insecticides that kill all kinds of aquatic insects in the affected waters. I can remember days when I was a girl when mayflies were so thick that they had to close bridges and bring out snowplows to clear them of the piles of spent mayfly bodies. Before insecticides were so ubiquitous, there was an abundance of food for nighthawks and Purple Martins to fuel their migration and feed their babies. Now there remains only a fraction of those aquatic insects, and thus only a fraction of the birds that depended on them. Whenever I see nighthawks I feel a renewed commitment to remind people of the high cost of pesticide use. Nighthawks are truly declining, but on an August evening, I don’t even want to think about that as I watch them wending their way through the evening sky. I trust that come spring, they’ll be back.