Common Poorwill sounds: song and calls

A Common Poorwill sounds like its name: a soft, mellow, two-note whistle, poor-will, repeated over and over from the ground or a low rock after dark. Up close you can hear a faint third note, poor-will-low. It calls from dusk to dawn on dry, brushy hillsides, rocky mesas and desert washes across the western United States, most persistently in spring and on moonlit nights. It is softer than the loud, three-part chant of a whip-poor-will, and it comes from much drier country.

What the call sounds like: a soft poor-will

The poorwill's song is a monotonous, mellow whistle of two notes, poor-will, falling from the first note to the second and repeated again and again into the night. At close range a third, softer syllable can be heard, which Wikipedia writes as poor-will-low and Animal Diversity Web as poor-will-ow. It sits around 1.5 kilohertz in pitch.

Both sexes give the same call, and researchers cannot tell a courtship version from any other. It works as a song all the same: males use it to advertise their territory and attract a female, and playing a recording inside a territory will bring a male in to investigate. Calling goes on through much of the year but grows more frequent and longer during the breeding season, especially early on, when males call from evening through the night until dawn.

Poorwills usually call from the ground or a low perch such as a rock. They may go quiet when they hear an owl, which is sensible, since owls are among their predators.

Other sounds: chucks and a snake impression

In flight a poorwill sometimes gives a short chuck. The strangest sound it makes comes from a disturbed adult at the nest: it tumbles, opens its mouth and hisses, an act that appears to mimic a snake. Wing clapping has been reported once, but nobody knows what it means.

When and where you hear it

This is a western bird, found from southern Canada through the western United States and into Mexico. Listen in dry, open country: hills with scattered brush, rocky mesas, grassland near rock outcrops, stony desert slopes with very little growing on them, the washes of the Sonoran Desert and open, scrubby pine forest. It is mostly a bird of lower elevations, though some nest much higher.

Northern birds migrate south between September and November and return in April and May. In the Southwest some stay all year, and southern breeders arrive as early as February and March. Poorwills hunt from dusk to dawn, sitting on the ground or a low perch and making short upward flights after moths and beetles, and they hunt more on moonlit nights than dark ones, which is also when you are most likely to hear them calling.

Nesting is minimal. The eggs, usually two, go straight onto bare soil, gravel or rock, often in shade, with no nest at all, and the parents may move the eggs or chicks a few feet every couple of days.

The bird that hibernates

The Common Poorwill was the first bird known to hibernate. In cool weather it can drop into torpor, lowering its body temperature, heart rate and breathing to save energy, and at the southern edge of its US range it spends much of the winter this way, tucked into piles of rocks. In the 1940s the naturalist Edmund Jaeger found a hibernating poorwill in California's Chuckwalla Mountains, and the first bird documented hibernating in the wild stayed torpid for at least 85 days. The Hopi name for the bird means "the sleeping one." Meriwether Lewis had recorded torpid poorwills in North Dakota in 1804, but nobody grasped the significance.

What it looks like

The smallest nightjar in North America, short-tailed and neckless-looking, with a short bill and rounded wings. It is mottled gray, brown and black, a perfect match for gravel and dead leaves, with a bold white band across the lower throat. In flight it shows small white or buff corners on the tail. By day it sits motionless on the ground, trusting its camouflage.

Birds that sound similar

• ?
  Mexican Whip-poor-will

  In the Southwest's mountains, this bird calls a loud, rhythmic whip-poor-will, three syllables repeated over and over, from pine-oak woodland at middle elevations. The poorwill's two mellow notes come from lower, drier, brushier slopes.

• 
  Eastern Whip-poor-will

  The Eastern Whip-poor-will's loud, rhythmic whip-poor-will has three strong beats and comes from moist eastern woodlands. A poorwill sounds softer and mellower, with two clear notes and only a faint third one up close.

Where the Common Poorwill card lives

The Common Poorwill is not in the top 100 of any single state album, so it lives in the national album of all 800 birds, where it counts as rare. Catching one anywhere in the country adds it there.

More about the Common Poorwill on this site

• What bird sings at night in California?

Questions people ask

Written by the Warble team from the sources above. Updated October 14, 2026.