Frogs and whippoorwills

From another letter my wife's Uncle Murray Raley wrote but never sent. The area is northeast of DeQueen, Ark.

I had come to believe the frogs had gone the way of the passenger pigeon and the dodo bird, but a Sunday or two ago I was lollygagging about the countryside and stopped at an old pond to look and listen. Uncle Louis and his family had lived in a house at the back of this pond back in the thirties and the pond and surrounding country was Chester’s, and mine, playground.

The house is long gone now and the present owner of the property has it posted. Suddenly, as I stood in silence, with my memories, contemplating the scene before me, across the pond and on the backside, a frog croaked. Then three more from different positions about the pond answered.

It was comforting to know that at least four frogs still lived.

The reason I have no frogs at home could be pollution. The spring branch that crosses my property, where the frogs would live if there were any, heads on property adjoining mine. The former owner of the property subdivided and sold it for home sites. There are several families living over there. Most of the effluent from their homes and the runoff from their yards, fertilizers, pesticides, etc., eventually find their way into this spring branch.

But the whippoorwills remain silent. … The whippoorwills disappeared over a period of two or three years. One year there were so many they came right up to the house. The next year it sounded like there was maybe half as many and the third year only one lonesome sounding whippoorwill so far off I could barely hear him.

What happened to them? Where did they go? No one I have talked to has an answer. Most haven’t enough interest in the matter to even have an opinion, but a few will hazard a guess of which the most plausible (to me) is that the whippoorwill is a migratory bird, spending its winters in Central and South America and that due to the massive amount of clearing for agriculture being done, there its habitat has been destroyed – and with the habitat destroyed, the bird is destroyed.

But as I already said, this is little more than an opinion: there is no official line on the matter that I know of.