The following text is reprinted with the user’s permission 
The conversationan online publication featuring the latest research.
In one of the most moving scenes from Stephen King’s 1975 novel “Salem’s Lot”, an undertaker named Mike Ryerson races to bury the coffin of a local boy named Danny Glick. As the night approaches, Mike has a disturbing thought: Danny has been buried with his eyes open. Worse, Mike senses that Danny is watching him through the closed coffin.
A mania overcomes Mikel. Prayers run through his mind – “such things will be done for no reason.” Then more troubling thoughts enter: “Now I bring you rotten flesh and stinking flesh.” He jumps into the hole Mike has dug and furiously removes the soil from the coffin. The reader knows what he’s going to do, but he shouldn’t: Mike opens the coffin, releasing what Danny has become.
About supporting science journalism
If you like this article, please consider supporting our award-winning journalism subscribing. By purchasing a subscription, you’re helping to ensure a future of impactful stories about the discoveries and ideas that shape our world.
Enter the whipping-poor-wills. Several of them, King says, “were beginning to raise their shrill call,” the plea for violence that gives the species its name: whip-poor-will.
This isn’t the first time whip-poor-wills appear in “Salem’s Lot,” nor will it be the last time King invokes them in his work. But despite the importance of the species to King, the whip-poor never appears in the film and television adaptations of “Salem’s Lot.”
Released on October 3, 2024, the final adaptation of “Salem’s Lot” includes bird songs but uses them sparingly. Here and there, an American crow or a blue jay calls. Sparrow-like chirps pepper scenes at night. And as Mike buries the undead Danny, he’s less threatening the call of a barred owl replaces whipping-poor-willed.
As a cultural sociologist Writing a book about the poor whip-wills of the EastI am interested in this omission not because it reflects an unfaithful recreation of King’s novel. Rather, I see the elimination of the scourge-poor-wills from “Salem’s Lot” as a symptom of broader ecological changes, one in which species loss is also tied to cultural loss.
Night terror
As early as Washington Irving’s.The Legend of Sleepy Hollow” the call of the whipping-willed-poora member of the nocturnal Gautarian family, he made American fiction crazy.
Perhaps America’s most popular horror whip-poor-wills They appear in HP Lovecraft’s novel “Dunwich Fear“. Lovecraft mentions the species nearly two dozen times in his story, with the birds appearing frequently in the death of the Whateley family in the fictional Massachusetts town of Dunwich.
Acting in a way that real whippersnappers never do, the gauchos of Dunwich symbolize the horrors that Whateley unleashes on the townspeople. Birds also act as psycho pumps: beings who guide the souls of the newly dead to the afterlife.
Dunwich’s raging poor-wills linger in town until Halloween — “naturally later,” Lovecraft writes — as they sing along to the Whateleys’ dying breaths. (In fact, most whip-poor-wills leave the Northeast by late September, and usually don’t coordinate their singing.) But while whip-poor-wills are essential to the plot of “The Dunwich Horror,” another common the owl, this one a great horned owl, replaces whip-poor-wills in the 1970 film adaptation. Lovecraft’s story.
Even kings, whipping-poor-wills have a great influence. “nLot of Jerusalem,” the short story King later published as a prequel to “Salem’s Lot,” whip-poor-wills haunt the town of Maine. And in the 1989 novel “The Dark Half,” King refers to the tradition of whip-poor-wills as psychopomps.
Lovecraft’s and King’s fictional whippoorwills are based on widespread Native American, European, and American beliefs about the species. A poor soul singing near one’s home was a particularly ominous omen, usually signifying that death would soon overtake someone in the home. An Article of 1892 The American Journal of Folklore documents this belief in King’s hometown of Maine. He also offers a story, probably apocryphal, as evidence: “Whoorwill aaa at a at atee sang again and again; finally, the woman’s son was brought home dead, and the body was brought into the house through the back door.’
Birds and belief disappear
For a large part of the century and XX. At the beginning of the 20th century, knowledge of the poor draft spread among people who encountered the bird. Outside of the world of folklore studies, you can find passing mention of villains in nature writing. Henry David Thoreau and Susan Fenimore Coopereven if these superstitions are not given credibility. In the 19th century, local newspapers continued to share bird knowledge with their readers.
But as the extinction of the species from fear suggests, the broader cultural familiarity with the pan-poor-wills has atrophied. In an exception, “Chapelwaite,” a 2021 TV series based on King’s film “Jerusalem’s Lot,” characters explicitly discuss the birds’ behaviors so that viewers can understand the reference.
The cultural suppression of the whip-poor-will reflects the true decline of the species. Conservationists estimate that the mind-poor populations of the East have It has fallen by about 70% since the 1970s. This decline will lead to what the naturalist Robert Michael Pyle calls.fading experience“. Pyle reasons that when a species declines, people lose opportunities to encounter it in local landscapes and don’t recognize it in the first place.
Even such declines cause social and cultural losses. This is the most serious when a species disappears. Consider the passenger pigeon. As author Jennifer Price shows in her book “Flight maps”, at a time when American life was entangled with the species. When large flocks of passenger pigeons arrived, communities gathered to hunt the birds, once a staple of the American diet. Now, however, the species is remembered almost exclusively as a symbol of human-caused extinction.
Likewise, the decline of common birds changes people’s relationships with the environment. For example, in the United Kingdom the decline of sparrows the landscape is stripped of the beloved sights and sounds of a once ubiquitous species. the loss of common cuckooswhile it means spring arrives in the UK without its iconic song.
Beyond cultures of loss
I think we’re seeing similar cultural changes with whip-poor-will. Their absence in adaptations of King’s work reflects their absence both in the landscape and in people’s lives. But despite the lossand grief properly characterize many people’s relationship with the pan-poor-wills and other declining species, I want to make a case for hope.
On the one hand, there is reason to be hopeful about the prospect of conservation: Whip-poor-wills it seems. respond well to forest management practices creating diverse forests with a mixture of younger and older trees. Many places where whip-poor-wills breed have an active conservation plan to help the bird and other species that share their habitat.
Nor are whipping-poor-wills culturally extinct.
After all, readers still find their way to the works of Lovecraft and King. These and other permanent references to the species, it offers people a chance to find the return of the bird, and what the species means to all those who have cared for them.
This article was originally published The conversation. read it original article.
