... and this year, he's brought friends.

I first wrote the below post in March 2009, when we had just started living full time in our house in the country. We didn't hear too much of the limpkins in March of 2010 or 2011, but they're back this year!

We pretend to complain, but it's so much better than hearing sirens all night in the city.

The Call of the Limpkin

March 2009

IT WAS MAYFLIES that assaulted us the first spring we stayed in our weekend house; their carcasses covering our hurriedly-closed windows like a thick shade. Another spring it was June bugs, leaving their molts an inch thick on all outside surfaces. Around March or April of every year we have some kind of mildly annoying natural phenomenon occur at the house, but this year we encountered a new category: an all-night and every-night attack on our ears … the Call of the Limpkin.

Florida pioneers mistook the call of the Limpkin for the haunting wails of tortured souls in the nighttime swamps. To us it sounded like a child or woman screaming, but along with how it sounded was how long it sounded -- all night, continuously, from late evening to early morning. The bird has marathon-level endurance … very impressive and I’ve never heard anything like it.

So did we close the windows? No, because on some level it was actually very cool: we drifted in and out of sleep while realizing the Limpkin was still calling … still calling … still calling … wondering just how long the bird can keep going. We found out.

Picture of a limpkin on our lakefront in the early morning light on March 11, 2012 ... after listening to the call all light.  Photo taken with a Nikon D80; f/5.6 @ 105 mm, 1/40 second, ISO 640.

You can hear the call of the limpkin by going to the enature page on the Limpkin and by clicking the “listen” button.