This is how I found out about Nighthawks and their diving sound.
   I had recently moved to Nebraska with a foster dog.
We were in an apt till I could find a house so I got up early,
0500ish to take her out for a walk.
The apt complex was situated between some large open field to the one
side and back, and on the
other side a small hospital.  I would walk her as far as I could to
let her off leash a little and then circle back around
by the hospital.  The hospital parking lot lights attracted some
regular nighthawks and I would
usually here quite a bit of peenting.  There was an a sort of old
abandonded construction area with a dirt path parallelling the road
by the hospital, the lights were further over.  One morning as I
started the walk back by the hospital side
in the total pitch dark of the construction site there was suddenly
this loud  sonic boom sound right behind
my head!  I literally came off the ground and turned around fully
expecting to see.....well I wasn't sure.
Scared the h*** out of me and I got out of there pretty fast.  I
thought and thought and finally wondered,
could it have been a bird?  I had no idea.  Looked it up and sure
enough. Time of year was right too.  A Nighthawk broke his dive right
behind me.
Must have been one heck of a dive because it really was loud.

Mary, Nebraska, soon to be Dayton

On Jun 7, 2007, at 11:03 PM, OHIO-BIRDS automatic digest system wrote:

> Around dusk I saw nighthawks "peenting" up in the sky over town and
> then
> flying far up and swooping back down to almost the top of a flat-
> topped
> building  where rocketed back up again accompanied by a 'roar' of the
> primaries as it broke the dive.


______________________________________________________________________

Ohio-birds mailing list, a service of the Ohio Ornithological Society.
Our thanks to Miami University for hosting this mailing list.
Additional discussions can be found in our forums, at www.ohiobirds.org/forum/.

You can join or leave the list, or change your options, at:
http://listserv.muohio.edu/scripts/wa.exe?LIST=OHIO-BIRDS
Send questions or comments about the list to: [log in to unmask]