Evening Republican, Volume 22, Number 115, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 16 May 1919 — HAD REGULAR SINGING TIME [ARTICLE]

HAD REGULAR SINGING TIME

Thoreay’s Interesting Account of the Chanting of Vespers by a-Whip-poorwill Chorus. What a pleasure it would be to know The woods and the wood folk as Thoreau d)d. In “Walden,” he tells us that “regularly at half-past seven. In one part of the summer, after the evening train had gone by, the whippoorwills chanted their vespers for half an hour, sitting on a stump by my door, or upon the ridgepole of the house. They would begin to sing almost with as much precision as a clock, within five minutes of a particular time, referred to tile setting of the sun. every evening. I had a rare opportunity to become acquainted with their habits. Sometimes I heard four or five at once in different parts of the wood, by accident one a bar behind another, and so near me that -I distinguished not only the duck lifter each note, but often tfiat singular buzzing sound like a fly in a spider’s web. only proportton•aily louder. - Sometimes one would Circle round ami round in the woods S few sept distant as if tethered by a string, when probably I was near its ■eggs. They sang at intervals throughout the night, and were again as musical as ever just before and about dawn.”