Laura Erickson's For the Birds

One of my favorite birds of all time is the nighthawk. Fun as it is watching and, especially, listening to them courting at twilight in late spring and early summer, my most thrilling times with nighthawks are usually during August and very early September, when they course through during fall migration. Here in Duluth, the birds passing over include those that bred way up in Canada, and every one of them is passing through on their way to South America. Some individuals will easily cover more than 7,000 miles. That is, 7,000 miles as the crow flies—direct from the treeline in Canada to the southern reaches of Brazil. As the nighthawk flies, that distance covered is much, much more because during migration, nighthawks dart this way and that hunting for the only thing their bodies are capable of ingesting—insects on the wing.

We see migrating groups fluttering about in the afternoon sky starting at the end of July, the numbers mushrooming as we reach mid- and late-August. In some spots, lots of them may gather over a good, buggy field for hours, but if we pay attention, we can usually discern a general southward trend or, here along the north shore of Lake Superior, a southwestern trend, as the birds mosey along to clear the lake. As afternoon leads to evening and the stomachs of more and more individual birds get stuffed, the nighthawks work their way higher and higher in the sky, their flight growing less zigzagged as they change their primary focus from eating to covering miles.

Nighthawks are seldom banded, and even less seldom are banded nighthawks ever retrapped, yet one banded Common Nighthawk was recaptured and released again when she was at least nine years old. How is it possible for a 3-ounce bird to fly so many thousands of miles every year? Long ago, an ornithologist calculated that nesting Barn Swallows each cover about 600 miles every day right in their nesting area, darting and swooping every which way to catch flying insects for themselves and their young. Nighthawks do that, too. Back in 1987, when Russ’s and my car’s odometer hit 100,000 miles, I wrote about birds, including nighthawks, flying much further than that over their lifetimes.

Nighthawks pass through Duluth every August. The most thrilling times in terms of close views happen when we luck into being in a place where they’re feasting on flying insects in mid- and late-afternoon. The most thrilling times in terms of sheer numbers are from late afternoon into the twilight hours, even as they move higher and higher in the sky.

We used to get lots of significant flights and a few ginormous ones every August, but most went uncounted. On August 26, 1990, a huge flight inspired Mike Hendrickson, Kim Eckert, and Dudley Edmondson to go up to the Lakewood Pumping station where they counted an amazing 43,690 in just 2 ½ hours—a vast undercount of the day’s flight.

This past week, a lot of people at Hawk Ridge and several Duluth neighborhoods were thrilling at the nighthawk flight. I saw plenty, too, but from my yard they were mostly very high up or way off along the horizon. On Monday, August 26, the anniversary of that big Lakewood Pumping Station flight, Sean McLaughlin and Marie Chappell counted 11,970 over the course of 10 hours at Hawk Ridge, and then Steve Kolbe counted 23,050 at a spot a mile or so east of there from for 3 ½ hours, making the day’s total more than 35,000.

It’s impossible to predict weeks or even several days in advance which August day will have the biggest flight. If you got to Duluth the very next day, the combined total was only 239, and on Wednesday only 11. Last year on August 26, the combined total for the whole day was only 3!

So seeing a big nighthawk flight is as serendipitous as it is stupendous. Like Shakespeare’s Prospero or the Maltese Falcon, it’s the stuff dreams are made of.