What bird is singing at night?

If the night singer runs through a medley of different phrases, each repeated a few times, it is a Northern Mockingbird: an unpaired male in spring, loudest on moonlit nights. If it chants one short phrase hundreds of times, it is an Eastern Whip-poor-will or, in the Southeast, a Chuck-will's-widow. Hoots, whinnies and rasping screams are owls, in any month. A robin caroling at 3 am under a streetlight is normal in cities, a nasal peent over rooftops at dusk is a Common Nighthawk, and a wailing laugh across a northern lake is a loon.

Sort the sound first

Start with the category. A song is musical and varied. A chant is one short phrase hammered out for minutes. A hoot is low and hollow, and a scream or whinny is an owl too.

The mockingbird: the one that will not stop

If the singer keeps changing subject, you have a Northern Mockingbird. The song is a long run of phrases, some musical and some grating, each repeated three or more times before the next, many borrowed from other birds, dogs and sirens. A male carries between about 40 and 200 song types depending on region, and keeps adding to the set for life.

In spring only the unmated males sing after dark, and they are loudest on moonlit nights; through the nesting season the song can run all day and much of the night. So the bird outside your window at 2 am in April is a bachelor advertising. Mockingbirds live in towns, hedges and thickets across most of the country, and in desert scrub and canyon streamsides in the West.

The chanters: whip-poor-will and Chuck-will's-widow

One phrase repeated hundreds of times, from woods rather than a yard, is a nightjar. The Eastern Whip-poor-will says its own name, loud and rhythmic, through the night; one patient listener counted 1,088 in a row. It breeds in rich, moist woods across the eastern US and is busiest at dusk, at dawn and under a bright moon. It has grown scarcer across much of the East, so a whip-poor-will near the house is a good night.

In the South the job belongs to the Chuck-will's-widow, whose phrase is slower, richer and throatier, with a deep, low chuck up front, on summer nights in pine and oak woods and along swamp edges. Both spend the day flat on a limb or on the leaf litter, which is why almost nobody sees one.

The nighthawk: peent and boom, mostly at dusk

A nasal, buzzy peent from overhead, with the occasional hollow whoosh, is a Common Nighthawk. The peent is its flight call; the boom is the male's display dive, air rushing through his wing feathers as he pulls up. Nighthawks nest on flat gravel roofs, so both sounds carry over downtowns as well as prairies in the warm months. The catch is timing: calling peaks 30 to 45 minutes after sunset, and a nighthawk calling in full darkness is unusual even under a full moon.

The owls, sorted by voice

Owls call all year, which makes them the default answer in January.

Barred Owl. A rich barking series of eight hoots, who cooks for you, who cooks for you all. Pairs also erupt into cackles, gurgles and cat-like screams that have been described as sudden demonic laughter. Peak calling runs from late January in Florida to early April in Canada, mostly between 6 pm and 6 am, in swampy, mature woods across the East and, since the 1960s and 70s, the Pacific Northwest.

Great Horned Owl. Deep, far-carrying hoots, hoo, hoo-hoo, hoo, hoo, with the second and third notes shorter. If two birds trade hoots at different pitches, the higher voice is the female, though she is the larger bird. Calling peaks after midnight and falls off once eggs are laid in late winter. It lives in nearly every habitat on the continent.

Eastern Screech-Owl. Not a screech at all: a quavering, descending whinny like a very small horse, and soft purring trills, from dusk on through the night. It is the owl most at home in suburban yards and city parks from the Rockies east.

Barn Owl. The one that does not hoot. A long, rasping screech, plus hisses and bill-snapping when it is bothered, from farmland, haysheds, chimneys and empty buildings. It is strictly a bird of full dark.

Daytime birds that sing at night anyway

The American Robin opens the dawn chorus with its rising and falling cheer-up, cheerily. In a brightly lit Pennsylvania town, robins began singing in full darkness on 79 percent of the mornings sampled, once at 1:11 am, while robins at a dark site nearby waited for twilight. A robin at 3 am is not confused; it is answering your streetlight.

The Killdeer is a plover of fields, airports, big lawns and gravel roofs, often nowhere near water, and it calls even at night. Its shrill kill-deer, kill-deer passing overhead is a classic mystery sound.

On a big northern lake the night voice is the Common Loon. The wail is a long call like a wolf's howl. The yodel is the male's territorial song. The tremolo, a short wavering laugh, is an alarm and the only call a loon gives in flight. All three are heard more at night than by day, most of all from mid-May to mid-June, on lakes in New England, the Great Lakes states and Alaska.

When it is not a bird

Some of the most persistent night sounds are not birds. A Minnesota resident once sent an extension office a recording of an awful noise in a tree that ran from dusk till dawn in late August; the answer was a true katydid, an insect that raises a deafening night chorus across the states to the south. Frogs chorusing from a pond edge in spring get reported as birds too. The tell is texture: a whip-poor-will's chant is whistled, with notes you can write down as words, while a katydid is a dry scrape with no whistle in it.

How to settle it from the window

Most night mysteries resolve with the table above and a little patience: wait for a repeat, count the syllables, notice whether the phrases change. If you want a name rather than a guess, open Warble at the window and let it listen to a few clear phrases; a lone bird on a quiet night is an easier listen than a dawn chorus. It listens for birds only, so a katydid or a frog will stump it.

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Warble is a game, not a field guide. Where this page states a fact about a bird, it comes from the sources above.