The chick, almost exactly the color of the dead leaves among which it lies, remains essentially invisible. Nests are found only by accident.
Whippoorwills live almost exclusively on night-flying insects, especially moths and mosquitoes. They have been recorded, however, as sometimes hunting for worms, beetles and ants under bark, or on the ground.
The bird makes no particular effort to conceal itself from humans. Apparently it does not regard them as dangerous. There are cases where it actually has lit on the head of a man standing motionless in the dark. The female has been observed to fly about carrying her young between her thighs. She also, it has been reported, sometimes carries them in her bill, but there is no satisfactory evidence of this.
The whippoorwill is fond of taking dust baths. Sometimes one is caught by the lights of an approaching auto as it dusts itself in the middle of a country road.
The bird is remarkable for the regularity of its song and for the number of times the melancholy refrain is repeated without a pause. From 150 to 200 is not unusual. The naturalist John Burroughs claimed once to have counted 1058 such repetitions. The song is continuous from dusk until about 9:30 and from about 2 until dawn. It is heard rarely in the intervening hours.
The whippoorwill, it is pointed out in a Smithsonian report, has come to depend almost exclusively on darkness for its protection. For this reason it has suffered little, as have many other birds, with the cutting away of the forests and the advances of cities. Its enemies in the dark are some hawks, owls and foxes, but has exceptional powers of flight which often enable it to escape even when discovered.
The birds linger in the north only until the first killing frosts which destroy or drive into shelter the insects on which they feed. Then they start their night migrations southward which sometimes carry them as far as Central America.
Ants Can Smell Almost Anything
The sense of smell is remarkably acute in all ants—at least equalling that of dogs.
The outstanding ant odor is that of formic acid, which is somewhat like that of illuminating gas, exuded from the bodies of all species. But this is only the smell of the race. It must be subject to an infinite number of variations to most of which ants alone are sensitive. They know their comrades, even after a long separation. Famed naturalist Sir John Lubbock once returned some ants to their old nest after a separation of 21 months. They were amicably received and evidently recognized as friends. On the other hand if a strange ant is placed in a nest of her own species she is at once attacked.