Book Review: The Nighthawk's Evening
Words by David Hoyt
Imagine passing through a rural landscape in which the presence of life was reduced to an absolute minimum. No wildflowers lining the road, only mowed ditches of turf grass. No insects swirling around lanterns or the back porch light, throbbing to a hundred different rhythms of stridulation. There is only the smell of freshly applied nitrogen fertilizer, the ubiquitous scent of suburban tranquility blanketing the landscape of monoculture row crops.
The sky is strangely absent of birds, seen in no more than small flocks lost on the empty horizon. Old farmhouses are in various states of collapse, and not a person is to be seen for miles. Meanwhile, enormous machines move through the fields at harvest time, guided by satellites from offices far away.
Now imagine arriving at the edge of a great city, the border of which is defined not by a wall or a moat or a sprawling ring of dingy exurbs, but by a belt of green life: prairie, forest, and lazy rivers wending between reedy shores and among vast marshes.
On the horizon are tall towers, and between them move flocks of noisy waterfowl, while raptors circle high overhead. It is here that people are first seen in number, working in teams to clear the woods of exotic shrubs, burn the prairies, and monitor beaver activity in the marshes. Others are cycling on paths or paddling on the water.
Butterflies are everywhere, and mosquitos are present, but not unbearable, hunted as they are by squads of Empidonax flycatchers, fish, and dragonflies. These park-like areas thread through the city and its neighborhoods.
The roads carry electric trollies, trains, and EVs of all sizes through viaducts, above which herds of deer or bison move unhindered. It is not uncommon to hear the hoots of owls or the peent of Common Nighthawks at night from the terraces of local restaurants.
Common Nighthawk. Photo by Matt Zuro, Westchester, Aug. 28, 2022
One hundred years ago, this scenario might have struck readers as fantastical science fiction. Today it is closer to reality. Metro Cook County is the most biodiverse county in Illinois, thanks to a forest preserve system older than the National Park Service. The highly urbanized 22-county Chicago region is one of the most biodiverse areas of its size, not just in Illinois, but nationally. The population of certain bird species that are declining in downstate agricultural areas are growing in the Chicago region.
At the same time, tracts of formerly industrial land in Chicago have been converted to natural habitat, and its once notoriously polluted namesake river has become home to a wider range of fish and mammals than at any time in nearly half a century. The very notion of the term “industrial” has shifted: while American cities like Chicago have de-industrialized in important ways, the opposite is true of adjacent agricultural regions, which are now subject to the methods of large-scale, export-driven agriculture.
The nation’s second-highest per capita rate of cancer is in Iowa’s Palo Alto County, known for its enormous hog confinements and the lakes of manure that they generate, as well as its more familiar productivity in soy and corn. Some of the worst river pollution is now agricultural in origin, rather than a byproduct of manufacturing. In Illinois, researchers have found that summer air quality in downstate farming areas can be just as bad as it is in Chicago.
Gretchen Newberry’s doctoral research, recounted in her book The Nighthawk’s Evening: Field Notes of a Biologist, was conducted a bit less than 100 miles west of Iowa’s Palo Alto County, in the small community of Vermillion, SD. Her description of the area around Vermillion is not unlike the dystopian landscape conjured above: agricultural fields empty of insects and birds, surrounding small urban centers which act as refugia for displaced grassland species.
Common Nighthawk. Photo by Fran Morel, Montrose Bird Sanctuary, Aug. 21, 2021
Newberry’s original intent was to study nighthawk behavior in a region of declining grasslands. By the time she got to Vermillion, she found that there was no grassland left, and that the only nighthawks were to be heard in the skies above the town and from the attic roof of her rental apartment. Mostly fruitless efforts to find rural nighthawks occupied the first several years of Newberry’s research efforts. They occupied her evening hours as she drove along silent fields to monitor her checkpoints.
Following the insects, as she reasoned the nighthawks might, she inflated a kayak and floated down a local river. Hearing of a sighting, she followed a lead to a sandbar on the Missouri River. For the most part, despite an occasional sighting, her searches were a bust. “No Nighthawks,” she writes, “is still a result.” The nighthawk, a grassland bird, had vanished together with what had once been grasslands.
Reading this, I appreciated what a joy it is to find wild animals such as Common Nighthawks surviving in urbanized areas. I have shared summer seasons with them as they forage for insects in the crepuscular skies above our neighborhood, until they gather in circling flocks come early fall for their stupendous migration to the grasslands of Brazil and Argentina.
Map of the locations monitored during the 2022 pilot year of the COS Nighthawk Project.
As of 2024, a research project entering its fourth year, drawing on volunteer monitors and organized by the Chicago Ornithological Society, reports a population of 213 Common Nighthawks in the Chicagoland area. As with a number of other species, Chicago’s quantity of natural areas and the quality of its efforts at habitat restoration are making survival possible for many living things. Just what it is that is keeping nighthawks going remains a bit of a mystery, but as in Vermillion, they appear to be hanging on.
And yet, the situation is far from ideal for urban-adapted nighthawks. This, Newberry tells us, “is the conundrum of urban ecology in the 21st century. Are urban habitats refugia or traps?” In quitting the countryside for lack of habitat, they confront new opportunities but also new hazards in the city.
Much of the book is given over to the adventure of rooftop ornithology necessary to describe such hazards. Nests are collected, offspring are monitored, and blood samples are taken to measure stress hormones in relation to temperature variation. Cameras capture all the curious behavior of animals when they think humans aren’t around.
Mourning Dove. Photo by Maxima Gomez-Palmer, Palos, June 2021
It turns out that an urban environment throws species together in ways they may not be adapted to, with unexpected relations emerging as a result. In recordings from her rooftop video cameras, Newberry observed Mourning Doves quietly gather around a nesting nighthawk and aggressively press in on her—without any hostile pecking or beating of wings. Days later, the nesting nighthawk, her nest, and its eggs, had disappeared. Common Grackles—“another refugee of the grasslands”—as well as American Crows, become predatory of nighthawks in the new urban habitat.
What do all these predators have in common? They are all animals that thrive in urban areas—because of us. They eat our garbage and at our feeders, they are highly adaptable, and they take advantage of animals that have nowhere else to go, like nighthawks.
As it was with grackles, species that might otherwise coexist more peacefully in wide-open prairies, where hiding might be easier for nesting nighthawks, might now find themselves in a predator-prey relationship under the pressure of a cramped urban environment.
Killdeer. Photo by Dustin Weidner, Park 566, Oct. 28, 2023
On the other hand, Newberry observed a mutualistic relationship between nesting nighthawks and the Killdeer with which they shared rooftop space. The alarm calls of Killdeer, she found, consistently alerted female nighthawks to approaching threats, allowing them time to quit the nest and hide. Hatch rates were higher for nighthawks when Killdeer were present to provide this security service.
Overall, however, the nest failure rate among all of Newberry’s nighthawks was 90%. Although the nighthawks of Vermillion, SD, found an alternative to their vanished native grasslands, they are still having a tough time of things. This is made no easier by climate change or human intrusion.
Newberry reports finding chicks drowned in puddles two inches deep after the kind of severe thunderstorm that is becoming more common in the Midwest and Plains. Their camouflaged eggs are accidentally stepped on by rooftop maintenance workers. College fraternity students hit golf balls towards them from the roof of a nearby house.
Perhaps most challenging of all, the roofs themselves are getting hotter along with the summer climate. The nighthawk, together with the Mourning Dove and Rock Pigeon, is one of the most heat-tolerant birds we know, an essential advantage for life on a Midwestern rooftop. But even they—and especially their chicks—are having a hard time staying cool during increasingly severe heat waves. The urban rooftop, though a passable substitute for plowed or burnt-over grassland, is the avian equivalent of a violence-ridden refugee camp in a war-torn border zone.
Common Nighthawk. Photo by Geoff Williamson, Momence, May 26, 2017
Nighthawks have the dubious distinction of belonging to two guilds that happen to be the first and second fastest declining groups of birds on earth: aerial insectivores—or those birds that eat insects while in flight—and grassland birds.
One wonders if a bit more forceful attribution of causality for these declines might have strengthened the book. While Newberry frequently mentions the loss of grassland to agriculture over the last quarter century as a primary cause of nighthawk decline, she is hesitant to clearly identify an enemy in her story.
“There are rarely villains in ecology,” she muses. Perhaps so in ecology, but there are certainly causal connections, in our era of the Anthropocene, between ecological changes and human politics. One might just as easily claim that there are no villains in climate change—though we know that there are policies and politics that have an influence on the climate, and that they should be clearly elucidated and debated so that action can be taken.
The guild of aerial insectivores need insects to eat. These have become harder to come by since the widespread adoption of neonicotinoid insecticides in the 1990s. Here, Newberry is more timid in causal attribution than she is with habitat loss, which she squarely links to federal biofuels incentives. Despite a large body of literature demonstrating the link between neonicotinoid use and insect population declines, and these with drops in bird populations, her language tends to present the connection as something that still needs to be proven, for which the key bit of research is missing.
“What these animals eat in different habitats, based on our pesticide use, is of importance, especially if we are to make the case that the aerial insectivore decline worldwide is tied to this,” she writes.
Map by JLogan, Wikipedia Commons. Adapted by bcfarmsandfood.com
Perhaps the case still needs to be made in the United States, but it has already been made in the European Union, which since 2018 has banned five neonicotinoid pesticides from outdoor, agricultural use precisely because of their role in the destruction of insect and bird populations. The ban continues to be controversial in Europe for political reasons, but the science is not disputed.
The most hopeful section of the book relates a foray away from Vermillion and into the region of South Dakota west of the Missouri River, where Newberry found a reality that suggests a number of positive policy interventions. Here, she found Common Nighthawks flourishing in a landscape that had, up to that point, escaped conversion to large-scale monoculture.
On the western side of the river, in Charles Mix County, the prairie meets the Great Plains. Instead of enormous fields of corn and soy, Charles Mix County contains an assortment of smaller family farms, including some that mixed cash crops with livestock and small-scale vegetable production. Geographers describe this as “landscape heterogeneity.” Conservationist Aldo Leopold would have recognized in them what he was shooting for at his shack in central Wisconsin.
What Leopold did not observe at the shack, as far as I know, was the mutualistic relation between grazing livestock—including bison—and grassland insectivorous birds. Not only do nighthawks feed on the insects that swarm around bison and cattle (hence their old European moniker, “Goatsucker”), but they are able to nest on the open ground left behind once grazing herds have moved on. Yet, here again, the question of pesticide use in Charles Mix County is unexamined. Does the mixed land use there call for lower levels of chemical application, thus preserving the food stock of nighthawks?
It is an exciting idea that Newberry shares—that working lands with active human presence can still accommodate some of the most sensitive and imperiled wildlife. It’s an idea that deserves to be imported east of the 100th meridian and into the humid monocrop county of the Corn Belt and Chicago’s hinterlands.
Common Nighthawk. Photo by Geoff Williamson, Montrose Point, May 22, 2018
We are certainly getting better at allowing for biodiversity in urban areas—in Chicagoland one thinks of the Peregrine Falcon, our own Common Nighthawk populations, the Karner Blue Butterfly, the Rusty Patched Bumblebee, and a number of orchids—all of which hold on within miles of airports, steel mills and expressways. Why should this not also be possible for the agricultural counties beyond Chicago?
The urban-rural divide looms large in 21st-century politics. Newberry’s work shows how this division deeply affects the non-human world as well, at the expense of birds and wildlife that have little concern with human political geography. The Common Nighthawk has been driven out of its ancestral grassland habitats by what is blandly labeled the “intensification of agriculture” but which can also be understood as a chemical assault upon an entire ecosystem.
The bird has found a promising but tenuous refuge in cities like Chicago and smaller towns throughout the Midwest. Newberry’s research suggests that the wisest course of action in support of this mysterious bird is one that builds bridges between urban refugia and areas of heterogeneous rural land use, making a bridge between one habitat and another, which necessarily means between human communities with differing economic and political orientations.
The challenge for the Common Nighthawk, and for all of us, is to somehow overcome the urban rural divide in our politics, our ecology and our imagination.