Voices: Common Nighthawk (The Skeezix Bird)

It was one of those hothotHOT summers in Chatham, in the heel of Southwestern Ontario, when it felt like someone was holding something to your nose and mouth so you could not breathe. Sweat accumulated in layers on your skin, but if it evaporated at all, it provided no relief from the relentless, doggy heat.

We didn't take showers then, because you just didn't - women washed their hair in the sink and wrapped a towel around their head, turban-style (God knows why, or how they ever dried it). If you were so hot you were turning into melted rubber, you lay in a bath tub full of tepid water, drained it, and felt more moist and clammy than ever. As far as I know, people didn't bathe every day, nor were clothes washed as often, but perhaps the predominance of natural fibres kept us from keeling over from each other's stench.

The humidity devil did not let up often. But on certain nights the sky suddenly cracked open, and floods of lukewarm rain caused some of us (mostly kids, or a few heat-crazed adults) to strip down to the bare essentials and go out in it, dancing around, hair streaming, mouth open. The cracks of livid electricity almost made my hair stand on end, and sometimes I felt it zip up my arms as if it wanted me for some awful unknown purpose.

But the buckets of rain did not help. Soon everything was just steaming, the air more choked with water than before.

Cicadas buzzed their long, rattlesnake-like arches of sound on those summer afternoons in which time seemed to hang suspended. We didn't like finding the adults - "June bugs", they were usually called, big fat things with wings - but the cast-off shells of the nymphs were magical. They appeared all over the bark of the elm trees that would all-too-soon be felled due to disease, never to be seen again.

But at night, there was this - this sound! A night bird, one that I called "the Skeezix bird" because that's what it sounded like. On damp, hollow, star-filled Chatham nights, the Skeezix would begin to swoop in the sky, the sound swinging near and far so that you couldn't tell exactly where it was coming from. It had to be some kind of hawk or falcon. But nobody ever referred to it or talked about it. It was just there, like the long-drawn-out tambourine-hiss of the cicadas. All part of summer in the city.

But when I heard the Skeezix bird, every so often I also heard the strangest sound, halfway between a burp and a groan. Short, hollow, and - stupid really, because obviously it had nothing to do with the bird, yet there it was, persistent. I even asked other people about it once, and no one had ever heard it. It seemed like nobody really wanted to talk about it. At least they looked at me strangely, though I suppose by then I should have been used to that.

Then one time, my older brother said, "You know that booming noise? It's sound waves from the hawk's cries bouncing off buildings."

It wasn't. In fact, until this very moment I didn't know what the hell it was or how it could be related to the Skeezix bird.

Then came this answer, this beautiful, golden Answer. Simply laid out. Not even a long or detailed video, just a clear audio explanation with pictures. There WAS a Skeezix bird, even if it was called something else. If it was creating that groany boom out in nature, obviously it had nothing to do with sound waves and buildings.

The real explanation is exotic and a little far-fetched, but it must be true. It just took me fifty years to find it. Play the video above, and be enlightened.

NOTE: Since I first wrote this post in 2017, I have become totally addicted to the Cornell Lab of Ornithology website. If you have ANY interest at all in ANY wild bird, at least in North America, you will find information about it here - not only pictures, but habitat, what they eat, when they mate - and, most magical of all, the SOUNDS they make. I have even identified a bird (Swainson's thrush - I may do a separate post on that mystery) just by narrowing down the species and listening to all the different calls. So if you love birds, and want to know more, GO THERE. 

Cornell Lab of Ornithology

A little more info on the Skeezix cry, dive and "boom".

On summer evenings, keep an eye and an ear out for the male Common Nighthawk’s dramatic “booming” display flight. Flying at a height slightly above the treetops, he abruptly dives for the ground. As he peels out of his dive (sometimes just a few meters from the ground) he flexes his wings downward, and the air rushing across his wingtips makes a deep booming or whooshing sound, as if a racecar has just passed by. The dives may be directed at females, territorial intruders, and even people.