New material added, 12/03/2002, see
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Photos of two individuals by Greg Clark, April 10, 1999
The Common Poorwil
is a bird that flies with its mouth open to catch insects. Active
at night, this bird is usually only seen in the daytime when flushed
from a hiding spot on the ground or from a nest site on the ground.
This bird is very common in Arizona during spring and summer.
Usually detected when heard at night, it is usually only seen
when caught in the headlights on dirt roads in the wilderness.
The nest for this bird can be found by walking along sloping hillsides
and watching for the bird to be flushed from the ground nest.
In 1997, during
work on the Arizona Breeding Bird Atlas project, the rarely heard
week-week call was recorded in south-central Arizona. This call
is probably associated with courtship because it was heard in
the spring. The sound recording available for downloading was
made on 3/15/1997 and contains the classic "poorwill"
call and also the "week-week" call. The
original Common Poorwill sound recording was produced using a
Sennheiser MKH70 shotgun microphone and the audio was stored on
a 48 ksps DAT using a Tascam DA-P1 digital audio recorder. The
recording was down-sampled to 44.1 ksps and converted to MPEG3
to reduce the file size. The distance from the microphone to the
bird is unknown for both recording sections.
The Common Poorwil
is a bird that flies with its mouth open to catch insects. Active
at night, this bird is usually only seen in the daytime when flushed
from a hiding spot on the ground or from a nest site on the ground.
This bird is very common in Arizona during spring and summer.
Usually detected when heard at night, it is usually only seen
when caught in the headlights on dirt roads in the wilderness.
The nest for this bird can be found by walking along sloping hillsides
and watching for the bird to be flushed from the ground nest.
In 1997, during
work on the Arizona Breeding Bird Atlas project, the rarely heard
week-week call was recorded in south-central Arizona. This call
is probably associated with courtship because it was heard in
the spring. The sound recording available for downloading was
made on 3/15/1997 and contains the classic "poorwill"
call and also the "week-week" call. 