One evening in early May, while setting up nocturnal insect traps at Sand Ridge State Forest, I accidentally flushed this female Eastern Whip-poor-will from alongside a small offshoot trail. Tucked behind a bush in the shallow depression she left behind, two speckled oval eggs remained amongst last year’s oak leaves –a nest! I returned a few days later and snapped this photo of her nestled into the leaf litter, dutifully incubating as her eyelids drooped in the bright daylight. Whip-poor-wills rely on moths as their primary food source, but the populations of both predator and prey have declined concerningly in recent decades. My research investigates whip-poor-will prey preferences by collecting fecal samples from breeding whip-poor-wills like this one and using DNA metabarcoding to identify the prey species consumed. Paired with insect trapping to detect the moth species present on the landscape, we can determine which moth taxa are preferred by these cryptic nocturnal birds and hopefully find clues on how to better conserve them in the future. In late June, I was even lucky enough to capture and collect a fecal sample from one of the two chicks that fledged from this nest before releasing it back into the wild.
