By Morgan Eads, Kentucky Lantern · June 11, 2026

On Sept. 29, 2025 a strange looking nocturnal bird took flight on a hardwired journey south from Kentucky. 

A 17-day trip that included a stopover in Baton Rouge, La., took the bird to Chiapas, Mexico’s southernmost state at the border of Guatemala. There, he spent 166 days before taking flight again on March 30 of this year.

On May 29, this Eastern Whip-poor-will was captured in Breathitt County, Ky., in the Paul Van Booven Wildlife Management Area within Robinson Forest. There, on a pick-up truck tailgate under the red light of headlamps, a researcher removed the backpack-like tag that was strapped around his legs and rested on his lower back just above his tailfeathers. The device would be able to tell the tale of his migration. 

The tiny tag and the bird that carried it thousands of miles are part of a larger study aimed at learning more about where Whip-poor-wills go when their songs aren’t filling the night sky in Eastern Kentucky – and why that song seems to be getting quieter every year. 

Game plan

Earlier on the evening of May 29, four researchers gathered in the small kitchen of the patchily painted cabin in Robinson Forest that they share with each other and a pretzel hoarding mouse they’ve named Billy Bites.

The study they’re working on started in 2023 in Pennsylvania with the masters work of biologist Nicole Notarianni. The study and Notarianni were brought to Kentucky in 2024 at the request of state Fish and Wildlife officials here. 

Whip-poor-wills in the state and across the eastern half of the country are experiencing a severe “rapid and sustained” decline that University of Kentucky assistant professor of wildlife ecology and management DJ McNeil says has been happening for decades. 

“When you point out, ‘hey, Whip-poor-wills are disappearing,’ a lot of people say, ‘you know what? I haven’t heard a Whip-poor-will in 10 years or 20 years, I guess they are disappearing, aren’t they?’” McNeil said. 

The decline is just part of a larger issue surrounding habitat loss and shrinking populations of nocturnal species. It’s something McNeil thinks people should remember when questioning whether Whip-poor-will conservation is worthwhile. 

“I think they need to ask themselves, how quiet can the night be for them to be okay?” McNeil said. “Are they okay with the loss of Whip-poor-wills? Are they okay with the loss of bats? Are they okay with the loss of crickets? Where do they draw the line? And that line has to be drawn somewhere, and many people have drawn it at Whip-poor-wills.”

Notarianni and another researcher, Nate Murphy, are fixtures at the cabin and usually set the nets and capture the birds each night on their own. But on May 29 they were joined by McNeil and a former researcher with the project, Olive Stringer. Stringer now works at a consulting firm in Ohio, but chose to spend her vacation time volunteering with the Robinson Forest project. 

Stringer said that the group of researchers is like a little family, and that atmosphere came through as the group crowded around a laptop and developed a plan of attack while eating last minute snacks of Crazy Bread and pretzels that had not yet been stolen by Billy Bites. 

They looked at pins dropped on a satellite imagery map of the massive 14,800 acre area, each pin representing a place they previously scouted by listening for the birds’ songs.

It’s a three note song that trills in the middle, ends on an upward lilt and, according to some, says the birds’ own name – Whip-poor-will.  

Their goal is to recapture Whip-poor-wills that they tagged last year, the only way to retrieve the data each tag gathered over the birds’ winter migration. 

They keep a tally written in marker on the cabin’s white refrigerator. At the beginning of the night, the tally sits at seven birds captured out of the 18 tagged last year. Three of the birds captured so far were found to have wintered in Mexico, two in Guatemala, and two had tags that were unreadable. 

Setting the traps

While the study in Pennsylvania largely focused on the Whip-poor-wills’ stateside breeding season, officials with the Kentucky Department of Fish and Wildlife Resources wanted the study here to take aim at the bird’s migratory routes, Notarianni said. 

Michael Patton, a biologist with the department’s non-game section, said this is part of a larger movement to try to target and preserve critical stopover points for migratory species. 

“We’re trying to figure out exactly where those areas are, so that we can make sure that there is always going to be plenty of food and habitat for them along this giant, perilous journey,” Patton said. “Without these important stopover areas, migrations pretty much just cease to exist. The birds won’t  have enough food to refuel and will have much higher mortality through migration than is common.”

Patton is one of only two avian biologists in the non-game section of Fish and Wildlife, so the partnership with McNeil’s team at UK has proven mutually beneficial. UK’s researchers do the lion’s share of the field work and Fish and Wildlife supplies crucial funding and resources. 

Beyond the cultural relevance of Whip-poor-wills, whose song is the ceaseless soundtrack of summer nights and referenced in music, stories and legends, Patton said that the birds are an indicator species. 

“This is a cascade, you know, we’re going to start to see more ecosystem decline and collapse, even. All of these species kind of build on one another. So once one is gone, others will follow,” Patton said. “So the idea is to conserve as much biodiversity as we possibly can, just for the health of Kentucky’s, North America’s, South America’s ecosystems.”

As dusk got nearer on May 29, the UK researchers gathered up rebar, metal poles and large, fine nets of varying lengths and set out to lay their traps. For the first, they scrambled up a steep incline near the cabin to try to capture an individual Whip-poor-will that has occasionally taunted them by singing as they sat on the porch after a long and disappointing night of catching no birds. 

Afterward, they loaded up into a F-250 with a protesting axle and a 1996 Jeep Cherokee with seatbelts that everyone assumes are no longer functional. The rest of their targets required a bumpy drive along washed out gravel roads and through fields to reach a reclaimed strip mine in the Paul Van Booven Wildlife Management Area.

Researchers are learning that reclaimed strip mines like this one are perfect for Whip-poor-wills, which prefer the low scrubby foliage of new growth forests. 

And the Whip-poor-wills aren’t the only ones making a home on this particular reclaimed mine. In the dried mud along the gravel roads, hoofprints of elk, deer and feral horses and cows can be seen. 

Scattered along the previously scouted area, the researchers set up about a dozen nets. 

They’ve got the operation down to a routine and are able to address complications before they happen. They straighten bowed rebar by feeding it through the trailer hitch of the pick-up, use a machete to whack down brush overgrowth that will interfere with the easily tangled nets and keep everything bound up before nightfall so that daytime birds don’t get caught up in the traps. 

With each net they took into account angles in relation to the surrounding foliage to optimize their chances. Whip-poor-wills spend a lot of time on the ground and never like to perch particularly high up. 

Once the nets are all in place and the sun is starting to set, the researchers split up to start the unpredictable and often disappointing task of trying to catch wild Whip-poor-wills. 

 

Territorial and tricky

From what researchers are finding, Whip-poor-wills are very loyal both to their chosen breeding grounds and their chosen wintering grounds. Once they’ve completed their long migrations, they tend to plant themselves in a relatively small area that they return to year after year. 

So what happens if they complete their journey only to find that their breeding ground or wintering ground has turned into a parking lot or a building? 

As of yet, researchers aren’t sure. But an educated guess says it wouldn’t be good. 

Whip-poor-wills are highly territorial, and if the bird had to try to find a new home range nearby, it would have to compete with whatever Whip-poor-will had already claimed that spot. 

“So let’s say it gets down to the wintering range and its little patch of jungle is now a Walmart or whatever. That bird is probably going to have to go somewhere much lower quality,” McNeil said.  “And then when it gets back to the breeding grounds, it’s had a really bad winter, so it’s going to struggle to perform and sing well for a female. Maybe it doesn’t get a mate that year and doesn’t breed. And these things kind of just, like, compound.”

The birds’ territorial nature is what the UK researchers used to capture Whip-poor-wills back in Kentucky on May 29.

Each researcher, now working on their own, went to one of their nets under the nearly full moon and placed a bluetooth speaker near it. Then they got somewhat hidden nearby before hitting play on a pre-recorded Whip-poor-will call. 

Sitting in tall grass near her first net, Notarianni started up the recording and a male Whip-poor-will swooped in almost immediately and began making a sound the researchers call “growling”.

“He’s furious,” Notarianni said quietly as the bird continued trying to identify the source of the offending call. 

But Whip-poor-wills seem to have a curious ability that’s proven frustrating for researchers. They are closely related to hummingbirds and appear, to some degree, to share the small birds’ ability to fly backward. 

It’s an occurrence common enough during attempted captures that the researchers here have named it “bouncing.” 

The bird Notarianni was pursuing got up against the net before seeming to throw it in reverse at the last second, flying up and over the trap before landing on one of the poles. It then turned toward the frustrated researcher before flying away. 

A tag recovered

Nearby, on a hill covered in poison ivy, McNeil had more luck. He captured a Whip-poor-will that had one of the precious tags that made the winter migration south. 

All four of the researchers reconvened and set up a sort of make-shift lab on the tailgate of the F-250. In total they had captured three birds, each of which waited motionlessly in bags hung from nearby branches for their turn to be processed. 

The birds are almost lizard-like in appearance up close, with large flat heads, wide mouths and huge eyes. They were relatively calm as they were measured, weighed or checked for bands before being released. 

Occasionally a bird would get feisty, making the same growling sounds they use to scare off bluetooth speakers or intruders on their territory. 

The last bird to be processed was perhaps the most important  – the tagged bird from poison ivy hill. His tag was removed the moment he was taken out of his bag, that way the data would not be lost if he managed to escape while the researchers looked him over.

The whole time the researchers worked on the captured birds, the loud and repetitive songs of the other Whip-poor-wills filled the area. 

What’s next? 

The data from the bird captured on May 29 was able to paint the picture of its journey to Chiapas, Mexico. As the researchers continue to capture tagged birds and gather information, they will compile their research which can be used by state Fish and Wildlife to focus conservation efforts. 

The department’s current work centers around land management. This involves removing invasive species like bush honeysuckle that strangle out the low foliage that Whip-poor-wills thrive in, and preserving natural habitats that sustain the insects that the birds eat to survive, Patton said. 

The department also works with private land owners to do the same on their own lands. 

But once the UK migration research is done and the far flung locations of concern are identified, the Kentucky department’s efforts will have to be combined with other states and even other countries. That’s where organizations like Southern Wings come in. 

The organization, which started in 2009, works with different government agencies and nonprofit organizations to coordinate funding and resources for conservation of migratory birds. 

And it’s through tagging data and research that they are able to make strategic investment decisions, said Deb Hahn, international relations director for Southern Wings. 

“This partnership is really dependent on the science,” Hahn said. 

When dealing with governmental partners, Southern Wings also points to the economic impacts of bird conservation. A survey in 2022 showed that three out of every 10 Americans identifies as a bird watcher, and that constituency had an economic output in the U.S. of $279 billion, Hahn said. 

This type of work has already seen enormous success in other areas, including in the dramatic comeback of waterfowl that migrate between Canada and the United States, Hahn said. 

“What we’re seeing right now is many of our songbirds and shorebirds and other waterbirds are experiencing these same steep declines, and the good news is, we know what we need to do,” Hahn said. “The hard thing is, we have this entire hemisphere south of the U.S. where we need to coordinate within to make it happen.”

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