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“If we don’t have the right habitat for quail, then we probably don’t have the right habitat for a variety of birds and pollinators — from whippoorwills and goldfinches to monarch butterflies and bumble bees.”

The composer Nico Muhly remembered the whippoorwill that sang for his family at dinnertime in rural Vermont and how it shaped his early sense of listening.

The valley that was their base, echoing with the call of whippoorwills, remains off limits as well.

You wouldn’t know it from “Walden,” but Thoreau wasn’t just observing toadstools and listening to whippoorwills during those two years by the pond.

At this time of evening, at this season, in the old days, the whippoorwills would fly in and we would hear them singing in the pine trees, sometimes so loudly they kept us awake.