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By Root 1271 0

in a warm room, he said: “That experience gave me an interest in avian torpidity and stimulated the collection of references on the subject” that he summarized. Among these references are accounts of torpid swifts and other “swallows” that were found in hollow trees, stovepipes, and rock crevices and clefts during the winter, after most of the population had disappeared. Most of these early accounts seem credible, aside from the likelihood that some of the “swallows” may have been swifts (since the terms were then often used interchangeably). However, in no case were the durations of torpor ascertained to see if the term “hibernation” was justified. All that is, except one set of observations made in North America fifty-five years ago on the poorwill, a bird I’ve met only in the literature.

The Birds of America (1917) is a large multiedited and handsome book illustrated with sketches, photographs, and 106 full-page paintings by the bird artist Louis Agassiz Fuertes, who went, I think, far beyond his famous predecessor John James Audubon in his handsome and lifelike bird paintings. I got it for a Christmas present when I was eleven years old from a neighbor, Mary Gilmore, who never knew how much joy she gave. It is, in my opinion, the best book of American birds ever produced, and its editor in chief, T. Gilbert Pearson, had this to say about the poorwill (Phalaenoptilus nuttallii, the western relative of the whippoorwill that I used to hear in Maine then):

Torpid poorwill (drawn from a photo in Jaeger).

“I first heard the song of the poor-will in a wild canyon in the mountains of New Mexico. In company with Charles F. Lumis, the archeologist, I was camping in the long-silent homes of the cliff dwellers, high up on the white tufa walls of the haunted cliffs of Tyuon-yi. It was a quiet summer night with the moon shining in great brilliancy. The surroundings were most impressive, and when the sudden cry of poor-will, poor-will, was borne on the air from across the canyon, it was as if a voice from the spirit-land had spoken.” He went on to say that this approximately seven-inch bird is strictly nocturnal, and like others of the Caprimulgidae, or “goat suckers,” it catches only flying insects. He presumed therefore, reasonably enough, that “these birds retire southward when winter appears.”

We gauge what we think is possible by what we know from experience, and our acceptance of scientific insights, in particular, is incremental, gained one experience at a time. Just as there was still much to experience about poorwills at the turn of the century, there is still much unknown about kinglets even now. One of those experiences that considerably stretched the physiological limits of what was thought possible for any bird after Pearson produced his book was an amazing revelation by Edmund C. Jaeger made in the winter of 1946–1947 in the Chuckwalla Mountains of California’s Colorado Desert (Jaeger 1948). The poorwill, which the Hopi Indians called the “sleeping one,” apparently hibernates rather than migrating. The Navajo are also familiar with the birds, and when Jaeger asked a Navajo boy whom he knew, “Where do they stay in the winter?” the boy answered, “Up in the rocks.”

Sure enough, on a granite ledge in a secluded crypt lay what appeared to be a dead poorwill. But appearances are often deceiving. After Jaeger picked up the bird, it stirred in his hand, came fully back to life, and flew away. The next year in late November 1947, Jaeger again found a comatose poorwill—maybe the same poorwill—back at the same spot. He checked on it at weekly intervals and it always appeared to be dead. But when he last visited it that winter, on February 22, 1948, the poorwill immediately flew out of his hand when it was removed from its place of hiding. According to Jaeger’s calculations, the bird was presumed to be in a comalike torpor for about eighty-five days, the time when there were no or very few flying insects in the Colorado Desert. On the evening of February 22, Jaeger first noticed many insects flying into his campfire and