Where, Oh Where, Are the Whippoorwills?

I am getting to the age where I forget everything that happened to me a few minutes after it passes through my brain. Those lapses in memory are called “senior moments.”

These lapses can occur at any time, in any situation, indoors or outdoors — it makes no difference. Occasionally, these lapses are of no value whatsoever, but very rarely one can lead to something out of the ordinary.

Such was the lapse that took place last week in the parking lot of a local shopping center.

I ran into a familiar face, which, like most, I couldn’t place. This face belongs to a male, and it was smiling. I just had to see what was going on.

The hands that belonged to the face were holding a device, and when it was snapped on, a wonderful song began to spew out of it. The song of a whippoorwill — who could forget that? I hadn’t heard one for more than 10 years.

The bearer of that unforgettable song turned out to be an old friend who is a full-time reporter for the weekly Sag Harbor newspaper, The Express. It was almost as if he pulled the real whippoorwill out of his sleeve. The song came across pure and simple.

We talked about how where he lives in Bridgehampton — it was the only whippoorwill he’s heard in 10 years. Since then, and when I pulled away, that strident but sweet song was ringing in my ears. Last week, Terry Sullivan went to hear it — it was silent.

Whippoorwills used to be common on Long Island, but while there have been a few new bird species from the South moving in, the whippoorwill has largely disappeared. In 1975, it was doing very well on both forks, but, since then, it has gone downhill and had shown no signs of returning in force.

In 1978, there were several flying low over the “Peach Farm” fields along Northwest Road in the East Hampton Pine Barrens. In the 1980s, when the kids came back from San Francisco to visit, a few were flying over Millstone Road and Noyac Path — but now, no more.

One of the few places where you will still find the whippoorwills on this fork is Promised Land, way out on Napeague and in eastern Hither Woods in Montauk, where the town wanted to locate a sewage treatment plant.

I became too old and stopped carrying out the annual count of local whippoorwills three years ago. Last Friday, when I talked to Gordon Ryan, the long-standing Montauk attorney and keeper, with his wife, of the environment on Napeague, he assured me that he and his wife still had two whippoorwills around singing most of the night away.