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]