Manic whistles rose from the woods at the edge of the lawn. The hair prickled along the back of my neck as I pressed my face to the cool porch screen and peered into the dark.
“He’s back,” my big brother Kenny teased. “And he’s gonna get you while you’re sleeping.”
At 8 years old, I no longer fell for his ruse. The nocturnal whistler in the old woodlot behind our house in Maine wasn’t a creepy little man, but a bird. A whip-poor-will. And I wanted to see him.
“Time for bed,” our mother called from the kitchen. Later, alone in my room, I fought sleep, listening to the whip-poor-will. My mind followed his shrill, staccato notes into the oaks and pines.
By day, I pursued Kenny into the woods like a mosquito, but he always shook me off. At 13, he’d bushwhacked to distant places I was desperate to explore – a hidden bog, a beaver pond, the far reaches of the woods – where, I imagined, the whip-poor-wills lived.
It’s possible, however, that these nocturnal birds roosted in the woods mere yards from my bedroom window. Perhaps, as I searched for lady’s slippers in the forest, I passed under a whip-poor-will dozing on a low branch right over my head, his stippled brown, gray, and cream plumage vanishing into shadow-dappled bark. Maybe his mate watched me as she incubated two speckled eggs on the forest floor, beneath the starry globes of a blooming sarsaparilla.
I don’t know the year whip-poor-wills stopped singing in the woods I had come to know and love, but I remember the silence after the towering white pines just beyond our yard fell. The owner of that patch of forest harvested the pines and built a house where they had stood. Even our mother, who never ventured into the woods, wept as we sat on our porch and watched the great trees fall. After the chainsaws stopped, I wandered into the woods and counted rings on sticky stumps: 78…103…96….
I was the one who finally left the nest, migrating northeast to the spruce-fir woodlands of the Downeast coast. Kenny stayed close and moved back home to take care of our grieving mother after our father died. But five years later, on Mother’s Day morning, he died, too. Heart attack. Just like that, he was gone.
The next evening, I sat alone in the dark on the porch of my childhood home while my exhausted mother slept. A car went by, a dog barked in the distance, and then the night fell silent.
Come June, I still sometimes go listening for whip-poor-wills, the birds that remind me of my brother, in various wild corners of Maine. I don’t always succeed. I heard them once on a twilight canoe paddle with my husband on a pine-rimmed lake, and once in the pine barrens of the Kennebunk Plains. A few years later, we heard the birds as we biked down a dirt road at dusk through clouds of mosquitoes in the Wildlands of the Great Pond Mountain Conservation Trust in Orland. Listening to their shivery calls, we searched for the tiny, orange lanterns of their eyes with a flashlight. Nothing.
I still haven’t seen a whip-poor-will, the first bird to call me out of the house and into the wild. The bird that synchronizes nesting with the lunar cycle so its eggs hatch as the moon waxes, giving it maximum moonlight for hunting moths and beetles to feed its ravenous chicks. The bird that migrates to the Northeast from wintering grounds in Mexico or Central America. The bird whose numbers have plummeted 75 percent in 50 years. The precise combination of reasons for the whip-poor-will’s decline is not known, but the dry, open forestland these birds need for breeding and nesting is also ideal for house lots. As this land is developed, the bird’s habitat shrinks.
Birds. A forest. A brother. Knowing that loss is inevitable doesn’t make it any easier. Is it ever possible to let anything go?
My obsession with seeing a whip-poor-will has softened over the years, but a nameless longing remains. A carved likeness of the bird sits on my desk next to a photo of my late brother, who’s been gone six years. Come spring, and all through the summer, I kneel at the window most nights before bed, resting my elbows on the altar of the sill. Pressing my face against the screen. Listening.