they travel at night

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They Drive by Night

When one of two truck-driving brothers loses an arm, they both join a transport company where the other is falsely charged as an accessory in the murder of the owner. When one of two truck-driving brothers loses an arm, they both join a transport company where the other is falsely charged as an accessory in the murder of the owner. When one of two truck-driving brothers loses an arm, they both join a transport company where the other is falsely charged as an accessory in the murder of the owner.

• Raoul Walsh
• Richard Macaulay
• A.I. Bezzerides
• George Raft
• Humphrey Bogart
• Ann Sheridan
• 92 User reviews
• 54 Critic reviews

• Joe Fabrini

• Paul Fabrini

• Cassie Hartley

• Lana Carlsen

• Pearl Fabrini

• Irish McGurn

• Harry McNamara

• George Rondolos

• Driver in Café
• (uncredited)

• Truck Driver Watching Pinball Game

• Man Griping at Farnsworth

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• Production, box office & more at IMDbPro

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• Trivia The wife of producer Mark Hellinger , Gladys Glad, a former showgirl for Broadway producer Florenz Ziegfeld Jr. , was responsible for getting this film made. Hellinger had brought home a large stack of scripts that he was to read for filming consideration. He had leafed through the script and read the summary, but felt that "nobody would pay money to see a bunch of truck drivers." His wife read this script, liked it, and pressured Hellinger to read it. Reluctantly, he did, the film eventually got made, and it became the sleeper hit of the year for Warners. It was made for an estimated $400,000 and grossed more than $4 million. (Source: Book "The Mark Hellinger Story" by Jim Bishop , New York: Appleton-Century-Crofts, 1952)
• Goofs When Joe and Paul's truck crashes, a motorist in a 1933 Cadillac with California license number 2N 214 stops to give assistance. Later, at Ed and Lana Carlson's anniversary party the same car (and same license number) is shown as one of Ed's cars as he demonstrates his garage door opener.

Ed Carlsen : Early to rise and early to bed, makes a man healthy, but socially dead!

• Connections Featured in Hollywood: The Great Stars (1963)
• Soundtracks When the Swallows Come Back to Capistrano (1940) (uncredited) Music by Leon René Played at Mandel's Cafe

User reviews 92

• Aug 28, 2009
• How long is They Drive by Night? Powered by Alexa
• August 3, 1940 (United States)
• United States
• Warner Bros.
• Sie fuhren bei Nacht
• Owens Valley, California, USA
• See more company credits at IMDbPro
• $400,000 (estimated)

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• Runtime 1 hour 35 minutes
• Black and White

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They Travel at Night embrace their industrial synth-pop impulses on “Go On” [BPM Premiere]

One person likes Radiohead – another enjoys Dead Kennedys. Oneohtrix Point Never piques the interest of someone while The Human League finds a comfortable spot in another person’s vinyl rotation. Complicated musical preference and infinitely variable influence have fueled musicians for generations, providing inspiration and fodder for all aesthetics and approaches. For They Travel at Night , the duo of Chuck Howard and Lou Scanlon, their combined intermingling aural affections define the boundless striations of their musical collaboration. Familiar, yet free of any overt genre burdens, their music is built from cross-angled rhythms and compounding creativities.  

A blissful attention to detail drives Scanlon and Howard in their pursuit of specific musical insight, offering release and revelation through individual moments. They are interested in exposing what lies beneath the superficial shake and rattle of their songs, the things that make time retreat and allow for unexpected examination. Their forthcoming EP, Entropy , due out early next year, is the result of the band searching for and finding a collection of sounds that heighten and augment the surroundings of whatever experience you happen to be immersed in at any given point.

On their new single, “Go On”, they revel in a dense cacophony of synth-pop impulses, a wild fusion of electronic styles supported by gauzy pop perspectives. What began as a stripped-down instrumental experiment from Scanlon built upon a single guitar loop and a solo grew as Howard fleshed out the track’s environments. Inspired by themes of mortality and eternal cycles, the song was built layer by layer, each one further drawing out thoughts of consciousness and various existential states – or alternately, as the band offers, “maybe someone is just chronically late, and their friends are sick of it.”

Listen to “Go On” below.

They Travel at Night will release their new EP, Entropy , on February 2. Follow them on Facebook , Instagram , and TikTok .

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The Night Travelers

Written by Armando Lucas Correa Review by Waheed Rabbani

Berlin, 1931. A young German poet, Ally, falls in love with a Black German musician, Marcus. They have a daughter, Lilith. To avoid hateful stares, they travel at night, as “by night, we’re all the same color.” When the Nazis seize control and Marcus disappears, Ally fears that the authorities might have seven-year-old Lilith sterilized. She persuades her Jewish neighbors, who are fleeing to Cuba, to take Lilith with them.

Havana, 1958. Lilith grows up blissfully in Cuba. She falls in love with Martin, an air force pilot in the Batista regime, and they have a daughter, Nadine. When Castro comes to power and Martin is imprisoned, Lilith makes a heart-wrenching decision, much like Ally’s.

Berlin, 1988. Nadine works as a scientist, ignorant of her family’s past. Her daughter, Luna, makes efforts to unearth their family’s history and discovers the appalling duplicities that have affected them.

Correa has used one of Rumi’s thought-provoking poetic lines, “Night travelers are full of light,” to title this novel, a multigenerational saga that stretches from 1931 to 2015. The plot weaves through that period’s historical events. Their harsh and traumatic impact on the lives of four women, Ally, Lilith, Nadine, and Luna, and their families, through war, revolution, and redemption, are narrated nonlinearly. The novel takes the readers on a journey through pre- and post-WWII events in Germany, the Cuban Revolution, the fall of the Berlin Wall, and other incidents. Correa mostly tells events, rather than show them, and his story has numerous flashbacks, perhaps to condense Ally’s family’s chronicle into one book. This structure reduces the multi-character fictional story’s dramatic impact, rendering it more like a biography. But the novel’s theme of the Nazi regime’s racist policies adversely affecting generations is well elucidated.

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May 27, 2011

Top 10 Myths about Bedbugs

The insects, making a comeback around the globe, cannot fly and are really not interested in hanging out on your body--but they do occasionally bite during the day

By Megan Scudellari

Roger Eritja Getty Images

Once a pest of the past, bedbugs now infest every state in the U.S.. Cimex lectularius —small, flattened insects that feed solely on mammalian and avian blood—have been living with humans since ancient times. Abundant in the U.S. prior to World War II, bedbugs all but vanished during the 1940s and '50s thanks to improvements in hygiene and the use of pesticides. In the past 10 years, however, the pests have staged a comeback worldwide—an outbreak after the 2000 Summer Olympics in Sydney was a harbinger of things to come. This revival may be the worst yet, experts say, due to densely populated urban areas, global travel and increasing pesticide resistance—something to consider as the summer travel season gets underway.

"By every metric that we use, it's getting worse and worse," says Coby Schal, an entomologist at North Carolina State University in Raleigh. Health authorities and pest control operators are regularly flooded with calls, and the epidemic may not have yet peaked. And because bedbugs are indoor pests, there are no high or low seasons throughout the year, he adds, only continual bombardment. "It's just the beginning of the problem in the U.S.," Schal says.

Spreading rapidly with the bedbugs is a mass of misinformation about their biology and behavior. Straight from the experts, here are the facts behind some of the most notorious myths about the diminutive bloodsuckers.

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Myth 1: Bedbugs can fly Bedbugs lack wings, and therefore cannot fly. That is unless you put a blow dryer behind them, says Stephen Kells, a bedbug researcher at the University of Minnesota. Then they'll fly about 1.2 meters. On their own, bedbugs crawl about a meter a minute, he says.

Myth 2: Bedbugs reproduce quickly Compared with other insects, bedbugs are slow to reproduce: Each adult female produces about one egg per day; a common housefly lays 500 eggs over three to four days. Each bedbug egg takes 10 days to hatch and another five to six weeks for the offspring to develop into an adult.

Myth 3: Bedbugs can typically live a year without a meal Scientists debate this point, but evidence suggests that at normal room temperature, about 23 degrees Celsius, bedbugs can only survive two to three months without a blood meal. But because they are cold-blooded, their metabolism will slow down in chillier climates, and the insects may live up to a year without feeding.

Myth 4: Bedbugs bite only at night Although bedbugs are generally nocturnal, they're like humans—if they're hungry, they'll get up and get something to eat. "If you go away to visit a friend for a week and you come back and sit down on the couch, even though it's daytime the bedbugs will come looking for you," Schal says. Keeping a light on, then, unfortunately does not keep these tiny vampires away.

Myth 5: Bedbugs live exclusively in mattresses "'Bedbug' is such a misnomer," Kells says. "They should also be called pet bugs and suitcase bugs and train bugs and movie theater bugs." Bedbugs spread away from beds into living areas and can be seen on any surface, he says, including chairs, railings and ceilings.

Myth 6: Bedbugs prefer unsanitary, urban conditions "Bedbugs are terribly nondiscriminatory," Schal says. Bedbugs can be found anywhere from ritzy high-rises to homeless shelters. The prevalence of the bugs in low-income housing is therefore not a result of the insect's preference, but of dense populations and the lack of money to pay for proper elimination strategies. "Any location is vulnerable," Kells says. "But some people are going to have a harder time getting control of them because it is such an expensive treatment."

Myth 7: Bedbugs travel on our bodies Bedbugs do not like heat, Kells says. They therefore do not stick in hair or on skin, like lice or ticks, and prefer not to remain in our clothes close to our bodily heat. Bedbugs are more likely to travel on backpacks, luggage, shoes and other items farther removed from our bodies.

Myth 8: Bedbugs transmit disease Bedbug bites can lead to anxiety, sleeplessness and even secondary infections, but there have been no reported cases of bedbugs transmitting disease to humans. They do, however, harbor human pathogens: At least 27 viruses, bacteria, protozoa and more have been found in bedbugs, although these microbes do not reproduce or multiply within the insects. Canadian researchers announced ( pdf ) in the June issue of Emerging Infectious Diseases that bedbugs isolated from three individuals in a Vancouver hospital carried methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus , aka MRSA. Still, there have been no reported cases that the bugs actually transmit human disease.

Myth 9: We should bring back DDT When the controversial pesticide DDT was banned in 1972, most bed bugs were already resistant to it, Schal says, and today's populations are even more widely resistant thanks to the use of a new class of pesticides. Pyrethroids, the main class of pesticides used against bedbugs today, targets sodium channels in bedbug cells, just like DDT. Consequently, as bedbugs develop resistance to pyrethroids, they also become cross-resistant to DDT.

Myth 10: You can spray bedbugs away Thanks to pesticide resistance, those cans of spray at your local hardware store simply will not do , Schal says, adding: "Relying strictly on chemicals is generally not a good solution." The most effective solutions are fumigation and heat treatments, but these can cost a cool $2,000 to $3,000 apiece for a single-family home. Scientists are diligently pursuing other strategies, including freezing and bait similar to that used for cockroaches. In the October 2010 issue of the Journal of Economic Entomology Schal and colleagues at the U.S. Department of Agriculture published a technique that employs inexpensive infrared and vibration sensors to track bedbug movement, which could be applied to the development of automated traps that detect the pests.

Listening to Migrating Birds at Night May Help Ensure Their Safety

One cool, calm night in October, J. Alan Clark, a biology professor at Fordham University, sat quietly under tall sugar maples at the Mianus River Gorge Preserve, about 40 miles northeast of Manhattan. Goateed and slightly puckish, the typically chatty biologist was still, hands folded in his lap, face tilted toward a night sky streaked with wisps of clouds. Clark has a professional affinity for certain sounds that few people hear—sounds that, in fact, most people don’t even know exist. His eyes occasionally narrowing, Clark was listening, intently, his ears cocked toward the stars above.

Suddenly, a buzzy little tseep note dripped down from the night sky. Faint as a whisper, short as a quick kiss, it stood out from the trills of katydids and crickets, and Clark’s eyebrows arched over his black-rimmed glasses, a grin on his face. That was it. The birds were there. Somewhere between the treetops and the cloud bottoms, one of the least-known, albeit massive in scale, natural phenomena was under way: the nocturnal migration of birds.

On any given night in the spring and fall, hundreds of thousands—and at times millions—of birds migrate across North America. From large herons to warblers to vireos, sparrows, and other smaller species, blankets of birds flow across the continent. While it’s a largely unseen migration, it’s not a silent one. Most of these birds vocalize while on the wing, making night flight calls, dubbed NFCs by scientists, that sound nothing like the better-known melodious breeding songs of spring. Barely discernible by humans, these chirps and tweets and buzzes, flowing overhead under cover of darkness, are increasingly being captured by specialized acoustic monitoring equipment that can record, analyze, and identify the call makers.

[audioplayer:161226|align:left|caption:Blackburnian warbler] Audio description: Blackburnian warbler

In fact, on the rooftop behind Clark perched an inconspicuous microphone, connected to a wire that snaked down to a lunchbox-sized digital recorder housed in the preserve’s offices. The system was deployed by Rachel Bricklin, a Fordham Ph.D. candidate. Her analysis of night flight calls is helping tease apart the factors that stress migrating birds using urban green spaces as they “stop over” at city parks to feed and rest. It’s just one aspect of how acoustic monitoring is filling in the feathered blanks of the night. Across the country, such monitoring is allowing both research scientists and citizen scientists to ponder issues as straightforward as what is flying over a backyard feeder at night and as complex as assessing the impacts of wind turbine projects and designing bird-friendly urban landscapes. The emerging acoustic technology is also supporting massive monitoring efforts that seek to forecast bird migrations on a continental scale. “This is making the invisible visible,” says Clark. “We are now able to peek into those dark skies and quantify and clarify nocturnal migration in ways that will make the world safer for birds.”

Even the most analytically minded can’t help but be moved by such an alluring aspect of scientific inquiry—the ability to glimpse a world nearly hidden from human experience for millennia. Scientists and birders have long listened to the night sky, pondering what to make of its subtle symphonies. In the course of five hours on a September night in 1896, University of Wisconsin history instructor Orin Libby tallied 3,600 night flight calls from a small hill outside Madison. The count was published three years later, the first quantified record of flight-calling nocturnal migrants. The first audio recordings of nocturnal bird migration came about in the 1950s; in those days some researchers captured the calls on reel-to-reel tape recorders hooked up to large microphones set inside rings of sound-insulating hay bales. In 1987 a voice-activated system to record nocturnal migrants was developed, a huge step forward that saved both audiotape and the hours spent listening to near silence. Scientists were still stymied, however, by the daunting tasks of counting, identifying, and analyzing hundreds and sometimes thousands of recorded calls, one by one, by ear, sitting at a desk for days upon days after long nights of recording.

Recent years, however, have brought about “an explosion of professional and amateur research in acoustic monitoring and the study of nocturnal migration,” says Jeff Wells, senior scientist for the Boreal Songbird Initiative . For decades, scientists have used radar monitoring to track large-scale movements of migrating birds. Radar has limitations, however. On a finer scale, it can’t differentiate between “targets,” such as birds, bats, and large insects. It provides no information on species, and is expensive and complicated to use in the field. By contrast, microphones calibrated specifically for recording nocturnal migrants—some of the best can capture the high-frequency note of a warbler flying 1,000 feet overhead or the hoarse buzz of a grosbeak at twice that distance—have become so affordable that avid birders are adding them to their wish lists alongside high-quality binoculars. Analyzing hours of recordings remains cumbersome, but automated sound-recognition software and sound-analysis software is now available for free or for a reasonable price. “These developments,” says Wells, “have placed this field at a new threshold.”

Most birds migrate at night. The stars and the moon aid night-flying birds’ navigation. Free of daytime thermals, the atmosphere is more stable, making it easier to maintain a steady course, especially for smaller birds such as warblers that might fly as slowly as 15 miles per hour. Cooler nighttime temperatures also help keep hard-working birds from overheating. And for birds that frequently wind up on the menu of hawks, cats, and other daytime predators, flying under cover of darkness can be a lifesaver.

While scientists aren’t certain about the reasons that migrating birds call when flying at night, there are some widely accepted theories. Research has shown that birds do it more frequently in rough weather and when navigating headwinds and crosswinds, so the calls likely help birds stick with their flocks. Communicating at night might also prevent fatal crashes. High call rates coincide with incidences of mass collisions with tall, lit structures such as high-rises and offshore energy structures. It may be that night flight signals serve as a warning to other birds about such perils.

These sounds are nothing like the beloved springtime breeding choruses. “We’re talking about cryptic little buzzes and whistles,” explains Bill Evans, director of a nonprofit called Old Bird , which facilitates acoustic monitoring. Evans was first intrigued with night-calling birds while delivering pizzas during college. In the 1990s he worked as a technician with Cornell University’s Laboratory of Natural Sounds, the world’s largest archive of wildlife audio and video recordings. Evans spent more than a decade recording and analyzing the night flight calls of eastern migrants. In 2002 he and naturalist Michael O’Brien published a CD with the recorded calls and spectrograms of 211 North American terrestrial bird species, an event that helped kick-start today’s revolutionary research. “Few of these calls are longer than a half-second,” he says, “and many are much shorter than that.”

[audioplayer:161236|align:left|caption:Baltimore oriole]  Audio description: Baltimore oriole

Consider the hooded warbler. Its night flight call is perhaps one-twentieth of a second long. To the human ear, it sounds like a buzzy cricket-like chirp. “Analyze the spectrogram,” Evans says, “and it’s a completely different language. There’s a lot going on inside the sound.” The spectrogram reveals a cup-shaped call in the 6-to-7.5-kilohertz range, with a ragged modulation—“a smiley face with teeth,” Evans laughs. No other bird calls with that particular signature; it’s like an auditory fingerprint that reveals the warbler’s unseen presence above.

With enough practice, many night flight calls can be identified by ear. The dickcissel’s buzzy note is distinguishable from the buzzy one made by the painted bunting and the blue gros- beak. There’s the chestnut-sided warbler’s low, buzzy dzzew call. The swamp sparrow’s buzzy zee is distinct from the short whistle of the hermit thrush. Researchers have described this variety in an array of onomatopoeic notes: wok (black-crowned night heron), skwonk (great blue heron), creeeenk (least sandpiper), and vheeu (veery). Other birds are not yet identifiable by species but are grouped into “complexes” of calls—the buzzy zeet group of the cerulean, Connecticut, and magnolia warblers, for example, and the sibilant, rising tseet group of the Tennessee, Nashville, and black-throated green warblers.

[audioplayer:161251|align:left|caption:Swainson's thrush]  Audio description: Swainson's thrush

It’s a confusing vocabulary, and perhaps the greatest challenge to acoustic monitoring’s potential lies in the analysis of those ephemeral, scattered sounds. A single station on the mid-Atlantic coast could capture 5,000 recorded calls during a long October night. This fall Evans is monitoring 15 stations scattered across the continent. The project might generate 30 gigabytes of data per night—the equivalent of nearly 10,000 digital photographs—which would take Evans four hours or better to analyze.

“We’re talking about a crush of data, night after night during the migrations,” says Andrew Farnsworth, a research associate at the Cornell Laboratory of Ornithology. He should know. Farnsworth led the development of the so-called “Rosetta Stone for warblers,” a groundbreaking collection of spectrograms and photographs of 48 North American warblers’ night flight calls, and he is a leader on BirdCast , a joint effort to forecast bird migration. Cornell, with Oregon State University, the University of Massachusetts-Amherst, Microsoft, and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, hopes to site automated recording stations across the northeastern United States and along the Gulf Coast. “Extracting and identifying calls from thousands and thousands of hours of recordings is daunting,” Farnsworth says, “and computer scientists across the country are working on the algorithms needed to turn this data around quickly and meaningfully.”

Already acoustic monitoring is allowing researchers to ask increasingly specific questions about how migrating birds interact with the landscapes around them. Say it’s early fall, and you are a migrating scarlet tanager headed south from the boreal wilds of eastern Canada. While winging over eastern North America, the darkened earth below glitters with roadways, the twinkling of rural farmsteads, and small towns. To the east there is the onyx plain of the Atlantic Ocean. To the west is the relatively dark bulk of the Adirondacks. Then suddenly, studded with blinking lights and glittering glass towers that reach for 1,000 feet into the sky, the New York metropolitan region scrolls into view. Scientists know that migrating birds are attracted to artificially lit structures, such as communications towers and skyscrapers. And 70 percent of birds migrating to Canada from eastern North America fly over at least one urban landscape. When faced with an entire landscape shimmering like tinsel, what do birds do?

[audioplayer:161241|align:left|caption:Eastern bluebird]  Audio description: Eastern bluebird

“Would you stay in the darker zones and fly to the west, tracking the Hudson River, or head east, along the East River, or go way over towards Jamaica Bay?” ponders Susan Elbin, director of conservation and science for New York City Audubon. At her office 15 floors above 23rd Street, Elbin, face ruddy from a recent trip where she was banding songbirds on nearby Prall’s Island, shares with migrating birds an altitude at which they are pre- sented with such difficult choices. “Would you just power on and try to gain altitude over all of Manhattan’s high-rises? Or would you careen through the skyscrapers? We don’t know how birds navigate these massively developed landscapes, and we need to know, because so much of the country is only going to become increasingly urbanized. Acoustic monitoring, coupled with radar, is the one tool that might finally give us some answers.”

Bricklin, the Fordham graduate student, is working to tease apart those questions. She monitors bird activity in two research sites—the suburban Mianus River Gorge Preserve and the Bronx Zoo , where her recording equipment is deployed on the World of Birds exhibit building. In the Bronx, birds seeking to refuel during migration are exposed to all the stressful elements that bedevil human city dwellers—from sirens and helicopters to car horns and crowds—plus dogs, cats, bright lights, and more. By capturing and testing birds for blood levels of corticosterone, a hormone released during stressful situations, Bricklin is looking for clues into how birds stopping in city parks respond to stress. The first step, she explains, “is to figure out the differences between which species are stopping at each site and which are flying over. That would be impossible without these new acoustic monitoring methods.”

Elsewhere researchers are studying migrating birds in less urbanized areas. In the North Sea off the coast of Germany, which migrating birds cross as they pass from Scandinavia through the Netherlands, German researchers recorded the calls of Eurasian blackbirds, redwings, song thrushes, and about a hundred other bird species to study what weather conditions prompt migrating birds to congregate at illuminated offshore wind turbines and other structures. Using specialized microphones shielded from gull poop by a stainless steel cover, the biologists ran the data files through software that filtered out the background noises of wind, waves, and rain. The study showed that night-migrating birds called more frequently during nights with high collision rates. In the future, these scientists say, acoustic monitoring systems could serve as a real-time automated collision risk alarm system.

[audioplayer:161246|align:left|caption:Black-billed cuckoo]  Audio description: Black-billed cuckoo

That was one of the goals of an emergency monitoring effort recently completed in Pennsylvania. Last September Audubon Pennsylvania, New York City Audubon, and the American Bird Conservancy learned of a massive public art display planned for Philadelphia that involved 24 robotic searchlights sweeping the night sky for 25 nights during the peak of fall migration. Working frantically in the days before the project’s opening, conservationists convinced the architects to make design changes and to add an emergency alert system in case the lights appeared to confuse migrants. Clark and other researchers assembled an avian radar detection system and three acoustic recorders to monitor bird movements during the light show. Over the course of the project, more than 735,000 migrating birds were tracked through a one-kilometer-wide (about six- tenths of a mile) radar transect over the light show. Thankfully, the monitoring showed no significant problems for the birds, but the studies turned up some intriguing facts. The acoustic monitoring devices recorded six times the number of night flight calls in the vicinity of the light show than at a recording station at the East Reservoir, less than two miles away.

Those findings are right in line with another of Clark’s research projects, a study recording migrating birds’ night flight calls as they passed over North America’s largest metropolis. During just 10 full nights and three partial nights of study in May 2010, he and his colleagues counted more than 300,000 “targets” (some were bats and large insects, but the vast majority were birds) flying over two roughly 550-yard-wide transects of New York City. “And that’s a huge underestimate,” Clark says, because many birds fly higher than the effective range of microphones.

It’s not only career scientists and conservationists using acoustic monitoring to study and assess bird migrations. In fall 2011 and spring 2012, Jessica Fleischman, then an 11th grader in Ossining, New York, set up low-cost microphones on the roof of Ossining High School. She compared her data to sounds recorded on a rooftop in rural Alfred, New York, 263 miles to the west. In 84 nights of recording, she tallied more than 20,500 nocturnal flight calls. With assistance from Clark and Evans, Fleischman showed that wind speed and precipitation were critical factors in calling rates. Her work won her a finalist spot in the American Museum of Natural History’s prestigious Young Naturalist Competition and a Gold Medal placement (top 10 percent of finalists) at the 2013 International Sustainable World Energy, Engineering, and Environment Project Olympiad .

As scientists learn more about how birds navigate through cities, the data could result in designing urban spaces in ways that mitigate danger. During spring and fall 2012, New York City Audubon deployed acoustic monitoring units similar to Bricklin’s devices on four buildings along a transect cutting through Manhattan—including the Bank of America Tower at Bryant Park—at heights above ground level from 40 feet to 945 feet. By dissecting who is flying where, and what influences migratory routes through and over cities, scientists could devise detailed “risk maps” of urban landscapes, identifying high-threat and low-threat zones. You could have the world’s worst building design in terms of bird collisions, Elbin explains, but if it’s not in a place where there are migrating birds, it’s not so problematic.

[audioplayer:161256|align:left|caption:Hairy woodpecker]  Audio description: Hairy woodpecker

“This is very exciting,” she says. “Acoustic monitoring is such a rich vein to mine. For years we’ve been picking dead birds off the streets, and it’s so sad. But this work shows that even though there are problems, the vast majority of birds migrate successfully. And there is more we can do to help.”

A few weeks after his nocturnal peregrinations, Clark received an analysis of what the microphones caught on that dark October New York night. Bricklin used two Evans-developed software programs—Tseep-x and Thrush-x—to analyze the Mianus River Gorge Preserve data. The algorithms parsed out the calls of migrating birds from the trills of insects, distant door slams, and the shuffling noises Clark made as he shifted around in the cool air.

Farnsworth, who assisted with the analysis, identified 26 nocturnal flight calls recorded over the course of the evening, a relatively light night for migrating birds. Among the birds he heard: black-throated blue warbler, chipping sparrow, savannah sparrow, more tseep -group birds, and another dozen calls of uncertain origin.

[audioplayer:161231|align:left|caption:Chipping sparrow]  Audio description: Chipping sparrow

At precisely 8:55 p.m., the microphone picked up the sound Clark heard: a super-short, buzzy zeet. Part of the tseep group of nocturnal flight calls, it’s a note made by a half-dozen migrants, such as blackpoll, cerulean, and worm-eating warblers. The call lasted an eyeblink-brief 0.06 seconds, dipping down to 6.26 kilohertz, a range well within what a human can discern. On a spectrogram, the call looks like a tiny wave train, double dark bands with sharp peaks produced by its buzzy tones. It now resides in Bricklin’s research, a permanent portrait of an ephemeral moment in the night.

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What Cats Do When They’re Out at Night

Author: Dr. Jason Nicholas

Published: March 21, 2018

Updated: November 4, 2022

Our mission is to help save dogs' and cats’ lives through our educational content. To support our efforts, this page may contain affiliate links . We earn a commission for qualifying purchases – at no cost to you.

Cats are a mystery (that’s part of what we love about them). This cat mystery is even more intriguing at night, when they wander neighborhoods and our homes doing… whatever it is they do.

Why Cats Are Most Active at Night

It’s often said that cats are nocturnal, but that’s not quite accurate. Cats are actually crepuscular, which means they are most active just before the sun rises and just after the sun sets.

Maybe you’ve noticed that your cat seems antsy at night or pounces on your chest to tell you that it’s breakfast time hours before your alarm goes off. This is because, for them, it’s mealtime (and because they can’t pass up an opportunity to deprive you of sleep ; )

Cats are natural hunters that evolved to catch their prey — mice and rats — during the dawn and twilight hours. Just because they now lead cushy lives where their meals are brought to them, it doesn’t remove their instinct to hunt for their model meal (comprised of about 50–60% protein, 30–40% fat, and 10% carbohydrates — a diet that’s too far off these proportions can increase your cat’s risk for obesity, diabetes, and more.

Where Cats Go at Night

It’s natural to wonder where the heck cats go at night. At home, they’re usually sleeping, playing, cuddling, eating, or sleeping some more. But what do they do when they’re off on their own? Turns out, it’s quite a lot.

Researchers at the University of Georgia placed small cameras on 55 cats in the Atlanta area and then studied more than 37 hours of footage to look for trends. Here are a few of the key takeaways.

• 44% of the cats hunted wildlife. Their main prey were reptiles, small mammals, and invertebrates (things without internal skeletons… think spiders and slugs).
• Hunting cats captured an average of 2 prey during seven days of roaming.
• 85% of wildlife captures were witnessed during the warm season (March–November in the Southern U.S.).
• Younger cats caught more prey-per-hunt than older cats.

Dangers to Cats at Night

During their nightly exploits, the cats in the study also had a habit of putting themselves in danger. Overall, 85% of the cats did at least one thing the researchers deemed a dangerous behavior! The top dangerous behaviors for those cats were:

• Crossing roads (45%)
• Encountering strange cats (25%)
• Eating and drinking substances away from home (25%)
• Exploring storm drain systems (20%)
• Entering crawlspaces where they could become trapped (20%).

If you’re curious about your cat’s wanderings or if you want to keep track to avoid losing them if they spend time outdoors, you might consider a GPS collar. In the video below, you can get an idea of what one cat did for about 12 hours during the day when its activity was tracked with a Pawtrack GPS collar .

Note: Preventive Vet recommends that cats not be let outside without direct observation. This is for their own health and safety, as well as the health and safety of other animals in your neighborhood and even you and the other members of your home (cats can pick up zoonotic diseases that they can transfer to humans or bring back fleas and other parasites). If this sounds like a good enough reason to transition your outdoor kitty to an indoor lifestyle, see how to keep an indoor kitty entertained and happy .

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Cats' effect on wildlife.

Even if an outdoor cat manages to steer clear of predators, their own hunting can be quite devastating to local wildlife. Researchers have found that as few as 25 cats in a national park can reduce the local bird population by half! That’s according to the National Park Service , which also notes that domestic cats can deplete the available food source for wild animals.

Animals like coyotes, foxes, skunks, raccoons, and hawks have a harder time finding food in an area where domestic cats have already hunted the available supply. If that’s not concerning enough, the lack of available prey means an outdoor cat will become much more attractive to other large predators.

Why Cats Fight at Night

There are two main reasons that lead to cat fights. As cats prowl neighborhoods and city streets, they will fight when there is competition for food or a mate. In many places, these encounters are more likely because cats’ territories are shrinking as neighborhoods become denser.

According to Dr. Marci Koski, a certified Feline Behavior and Training Professional , studies have shown that cats' home ranges and territories are shrinking as the environment gets more crowded with cats — in other words, more cats in closer proximity equals more encounters and more fights as they compete over resources. And these chance encounters are more likely during the pre-dawn and post-twilight hours when cats are venturing out to hunt (remember how they’re crepuscular?).

Cat-Bite Abscesses From Cat Fights

Unfortunately, cat fights can be quite vicious, resulting in scratches and cat-bite abscesses that can rack up vet bills of several hundred dollars to more than $1,000 and even spread diseases (see more on this below). A cat-bite abscess results in a soft swollen wound under the cat’s skin.

It may be several days before you notice it. Worse still, cat-bite abscesses can pop and ooze the puss within. You might not notice a bite abscess until it begins to swell, but there are additional signs that might indicate a problem.

Signs that could indicate a cat bite abscess:

• Decreased appetite
• Lowered energy levels

While some cat bite abscesses may rupture and then heal on their own with some home care, these injuries are best dealt with by your veterinarian.

Other Common Cat Fight Injuries

In addition to bite abscesses, bite wounds are also the primary way of transmitting Feline Immunodeficiency Virus (FIV – a.k.a. “feline AIDS”), as well as Feline Leukemia (FeLV).

Untreated fight wounds can easily become infected. A cat’s mouth carries as many bacteria as a dog’s, but their teeth are better suited to transmit those bacteria, even through minute puncture wounds, according to researchers with the Mayo Clinic .

Cat claws also carry a ton of their own bacteria, which will fester and thrive in the warm moist environment of a fresh wound. In fact, cat scratch fever (the horribly painful disease for humans, not the horribly painful song) is caused by the Bartonella bacteria transferred through a cat’s claws, which is actually transmitted to a cat through fleas.

Unneutered males are far more likely to fight than neutered cats. This is even true of multi-cat households, where unneutered males are more likely to fight with each other as well as spray to mark their territory. Neutering indoor-only cats won’t eliminate fighting, but it should reduce the number of fights.

Sounds Cats Make at Night

Aside from the obvious sound of a cat fight, one of the main times you’re likely to hear a cat is when they want to be heard, like when they’re looking for food or a mate. The video below includes an example of cat mating sounds. You might also enjoy the other videos compiled by Meowsic (think “music” combined with “meow”), a research group that is studying the ways cats communicate with each other — and with us.

Why Cats Yowl at Night

Excessive vocalizing might be due to a variety of factors. If your cat is yowling at night, it might not be cause for immediate concern, but you shouldn’t ignore this behavior either. Here are some of the most likely reasons behind yowling.

• Old Age: Yowling in older cats might be due to Feline Cognitive Dysfunction Syndrome, otherwise known as feline dementia.
• Boredom: An indoor cat that doesn’t get many opportunities for exercise or play might yowl excessively because they’re bored.
• Stress: Sudden changes in a cat’s routine — like the addition of a new baby or a recent move — can stress out a cat and cause them to vocalize.
• High blood pressure (hypertension)
• Excessive thyroid hormone (hyperthyroidism)
• Kidney disease
• Bladder inflammation
• And a host of other possible causes

Important Note on Vocalizing: If your cat is vocalizing and straining while using the litter box, get them to the vet immediately! This could be a sign of urinary obstruction , which isn’t just painful and distressing to a cat, but will also be fatal if veterinary care isn’t sought promptly.

About the author

Dr. Jason Nicholas

Dr. Nicholas graduated with honors from The Royal Veterinary College in London, England and completed his Internship at the Animal Medical Center in New York City. He currently lives in the Pacific Northwest.

Dr. Nicholas spent many years as an emergency and general practice veterinarian obsessed with keeping pets safe and healthy. He is the author of Preventive Vet’s 101 Essential Tips book series.

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A family night at the museum — sleepovers and culture after dark for tots to teens

Embark on your own family night at the museum with these sleepover experiences.

From drifting off beside a dinosaur skeleton in London to watching dancers on the streets of the Maltese capital Valletta, there are plenty of ways for families to extend cultural fun beyond normal daytime hours and into or even through the night.

1. Natural History Museum, London

Best for: animal fans Just down the road from the Science Museum, the popular prehistory-themed Dino Snores sleepovers for seven- to 11-year-olds sell out fast. Families get to explore galleries by torchlight, create a dinosaur T-shirt and watch a child-focused show by a resident scientist. VIP (Very Important Palaeontologists) ticket-holders also get a camp bed near Sophie the Stegosaurus, access to an animal-handling show and a snack box for late-night munchies.

2.   Kennedy Space Center Visitor Complex, Florida

Best for: space nerds NASA’s epic visitor centre at Cape Canaveral, home of many of the US’s space launches, runs sleepovers in two different but equally thrilling locations: a defunct space orbiter vehicle called Space Shuttle Atlantis or the Apollo/Saturn V Center, where a Saturn V moon rocket is displayed. The experience is aimed at small groups of 10- to 14-year-olds travelling with a chaperone, and has educational elements including STEM-based challenges and scavenger hunts.

3. Science Museum, London

Best for: aspiring astronauts   Designed for seven- to 11-year-olds, this vast museum dedicated to human ingenuity runs space-inspired Astronights. The experience includes workshops, science shows and sessions in both the museum’s IMAX cinema and its Wonderlab, which has seven zones dedicated to scientific phenomena. If you upgrade to a VIP ticket, you get an airbed instead of a camping mat, plus extra treats at breakfast.

4. British Museum, London

Best for: history-lovers   Created for eight- to 15-year- olds, the nocturnal adventures at this vast repository of artefacts from around the globe have a changing historic theme. Workshops, activities and storytelling help bring the past vividly to life. Families then bed down in the Egyptian and Assyrian galleries, surrounded by kings and gods from the ancient world. After breakfast the next morning, guests are privy to an exclusive gallery trail before the museum opens to the public.

5.   National Museum Cardiff

Best for: budding palaeontologists As an alternative to the popular Natural History Museum experience in London, this Welsh venue invites kids aged six to 12 on sleepovers centred around its geology and natural history exhibits. It includes a torchlit tour, craft workshops inspired by fossils from the collection and a pre-bedtime movie. VIP ticket-holders also get a visit from ‘Ranger Chris’ with one of his reptiles, time with a palaeontologist and a peek into the museum’s store of dinosaur bones.

6. Grand Théâtre, Geneva

Best for: drama students   A Swiss institution built in 1879, retaining its original beaux-arts facade, this opera house and ballet venue organises sleepovers open to all ages. Stays include a tour of the building and its maze-like backstage areas, set to a soundtrack of music from days gone by. Afterwards, you’ll bed down with your sleeping mat, sleeping bag or blanket, pillow and teddy bear in the grand foyer with its chandeliers, gilded surfaces, frescoes, wood panelling and lavish paintings.

7. Intrepid Museum, New York City

Best for: Top Gun fans Travellers to the Big Apple can sleep over in this museum on the Hudson, housed inside a Second World War aircraft carrier. The exhibits focus on American military and maritime history, and Operation Slumber gives families with kids aged six to 17 the opportunity to delve deeper into what it takes to live, eat and sleep aboard an aircraft carrier. The experience includes a torchlight guided tour of the flight deck, unlimited simulator rides and a pop-up planetarium.

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I stayed in 2 of Arizona's top hotels, and they couldn't have been more different. Take a look.

Posted: April 27, 2024 | Last updated: April 27, 2024

• Scottsdale, Arizona, has become a popular destination for luxury travelers.
• The Phoenician and Hermosa Inn are among Arizona's top luxury hotel offerings.
• I stayed in both and had two completely different experiences.

Arizona is a hot spot for luxury travelers .

The state is known for its award-winning travel offerings, from high-end resorts and spas to pristine golf courses and awe-inspiring desert landscapes, Condé Nast Traveler reported in 2023 .

This is especially true in Scottsdale.

In 2022, the city outside Phoenix hosted roughly 11 million tourists, from day trippers to overnight visitors, who spent a total of $3.2 billion, according to the city's Tourism and Events department .

I recently visited the Southwest desert town and stayed at two of Arizona's four-star top hotels — The Phoenician in Scottsdale and the Hermosa Inn in Paradise Valley, a nearby town known as " the Beverly Hills of Arizona ."

The Phoenician was named "Arizona's Leading Resort" in the 2023 World Travel Awards . It also received the Forbes Travel Guide Four-Star Award in 2024 for the 22nd time in a row, according to the hotel's website .

Meanwhile, the Hermosa Inn is a boutique establishment that Travel + Leisure named the best hotel in Arizona in 2023.

I had top-tier VIP experiences at both establishments, but the vibes at each couldn't have been more different. Ultimately, I think they were made for two different vacations.

I spent my first night at the Phoenician, a gigantic resort with 645 rooms.

From the moment my cab turned into its entrance, the Phoenician felt like a mega-resort . The 600-acre property was dotted with fountains, golfing greens, and several large buildings.

A winding road led to the main building, where the lobby and several accommodations, restaurants, shops, and event spaces were located.

After exploring the entire resort on foot the next day, I got lost on the way back. It took me about 30 minutes to find my room from the far end of the site.

Inside, the lobby had a warm color palette and modern decor.

Open since 1998, the luxury Marriott Hotel has gone through several interior renovations. Most recently, the accommodations were redesigned in 2016, and public spaces were revamped in 2018.

The lobby was huge. The warm hues of beige and red paired with geometric patterned fabrics reminded me of the desert landscape and Southwestern style.

My room was 600 square feet, with a bed, a sectional couch, and a balcony.

The deluxe room I booked typically costs about $800 a night when booked a month in advance, according to a search on the company's website. Business Insider received a media rate for the one-night stay.

I thought the furniture and decor were modern, like in the lobby, but there were more grays, making the beige elements feel like accents.

I had a comfy, king-sized bed across from a TV and storage cabinets holding a safe, a mini-fridge, and a Keurig coffee maker.

The bathroom was spacious, with a shower and a large tub.

The bathroom felt luxurious, with marble flooring and counters. There were two robes hanging inside, too.

From the balcony, I could see the building's unique architecture.

The geometric building paired boxy edges with a curvature. I thought it was a neat shape for a hotel.

But most of the fun took place in the communal resort areas such as the pool complex.

The complex has five pools, including one water playground and one adult-only pool. The pools are surrounded by lounge chairs, cabanas, and palm trees for shade.

During my stay, there seemed to be enough space for each guest to have a secluded experience. I didn't see crowds in the afternoon.

The Phoenician has eight restaurants and bars on-site.

The resort houses the award-winning restaurants J&G Steakhouse and Mowry & Cotton, and the award-winning lobby bar, Thirsty Camel.

The resort is home to an award-winning five-star spa.

The Phoenician Spa, which won the Forbes Travel Guide Five Star Award in 2024 for the fifth consecutive year, has 24 treatment rooms, a rooftop pool, a fitness center, a sauna, and a room dedicated to peace and quiet. There's also a boutique, a dry bar, and a nail salon.

Near the spa, there's an athletic club.

The athletic club has several tennis, pickleball, and basketball courts.

There's also an 18-hole golf course on-site with a driving range.

The course is surrounded by views of the Sonoran Desert.

The resort has a cactus garden, too.

The garden is behind the main building on a secluded, shaded trail. The short walk is dotted with 250 different kinds of plants.

After my night at the massive Phoenician resort, I checked in at the Hermosa Inn for a different experience.

A road in Paradise Valley lined with hilly fields and grand estates led to the Hermosa Inn. The hotel's entrance was a small, traditional adobe structure just a few yards from the main road.

The six-acre property has 43 casita accommodations in individual buildings of the same design style rooted in history, according to the company's website .

In 1936, cowboy and artist Alonzo "Lon" Megargee built the now-hotel to serve as his home and studio until 1941, when it opened as the Hermosa Inn.

Inside and out, the decor maintains a traditional Southwestern style.

Unlike the Phoenician, there's nothing modern about the Hermosa Inn's interior design.

Instead, it transports visitors to the early 20th-century West from the moment they check-in, with adobe bricks, wooden beams, and high-quality rustic furniture. The lobby and rooms showcase some of Megargee's artwork, too.

Winding garden paths lead to the casitas.

Instead of being in a secluded space like at the Phoenician, the gardens lined the pathways around the resort.

Guests can access bikes on the property, but I explored on foot.

It was a peaceful and quiet walk to my room. I passed through archways and spotted fountains and vibrant flower beds.

My room was a deluxe casita at the back of the property.

At the end of the garden path, I had a secluded deluxe casita with a patio.

The room costs about $600 a night a month in advance, according to a search on the company's website. BI received a media rate for the one-night stay.

Inside, the 600-square-foot room has a seating area, a king-sized bed, a bathroom, and a fireplace.

The interior design was as Southwestern as the lobby, with wooden window shutters and a bed with wooden posts that made me feel like royalty.

Apart from the balcony, this room had all the same amenities as the Phoenician accommodation, from a safe to a mini-fridge.

The bathroom had a similar rustic flair.

Apart from the style, the bathroom at the Hermosa Inn was much like the Phoenician's. It was spacious, with a roomy shower and a soaking tub.

The pool area was much smaller at the Hermosa Inn.

At the Hermosa Inn, there is one pool and one whirlpool. I only saw a couple of guests using it at a time during my stay. Like the Phoenician, the Hermosa Inn also has a spa.

There's one restaurant and bar at the Hermosa Inn.

LON's was named the most romantic restaurant in Arizona by Food & Wine Magazine in 2022. It serves breakfast, brunch, lunch, and dinner and has a massive, garden-side outdoor patio as well as indoor seating. LON's Last Drop is the bar next to it, which has an outdoor adobe fireplace.

A wine cellar beneath the restaurant hosts guests with an exclusive tasting menu.

The underground room is always kept at 57 degrees.

There's also a library on-site with limited-edition art books and a fireplace.

The library is often used for wedding receptions and hosts up to 32 guests.

The hotel has a small fitness center.

The fitness center at the Hermosa Inn is small, but this makes sense, considering there are so few guests at a time compared to the Phoenician.

The Phoenician seemed great for families, while the Hermosa Inn provided a more unique, secluded, and cultural experience.

The Phoenician provided so many amenities, restaurants, and activities that guests could spend their entire vacation on the property. The resort is ideal for families and those looking to spend their days playing sports and chilling by the pool.

While much less extensive, the Hermosa Inn provides a unique experience for those looking to appreciate culture, peace, and quiet.

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Hummingbird Migration

Like many species of birds, hummingbirds seek out a more tropical climate for the winter months, and will pack up and head south for the cold season. While some choose to stay in colder climates and not all will travel the same route, the ones that do migrate have a lot to prepare for. No matter where they are going, it’s a rough road ahead. Not all of the questions about migrating hummingbirds have been answered. People still work to track their patterns by banding them, however there are a few pieces of information that we know.

Table of Contents

How do hummingbirds prepare for migration?

When do they migrate, how far do they travel, where do hummingbirds migrate, how can you help hummingbirds during migration, why do hummingbirds migrate.

You might think that all hummingbirds are in the business of eating nectar from your feeders and flowers, but they also like a good bit of meat. Hummingbirds eat insects and spiders and when they cold months arrive those insects go away. Even with your hummingbird feeder full, they’ll want to go where the food sources are rich and plentiful. Hummingbirds love going places where there is a lot of food because the fight with other territorial hummers is a little less aggressive when there is a lot to eat.

Hummingbirds get ready for departure by fattening themselves up. That is why it is important if you provide hummingbird nectar for your hummer community, you are aware when the migration season ends and begins. They will need to fuel up before leaving and they will be exhausted when they return, which means more food. Before they leave to migrate, you might notice how large they are getting. They try to double their weight for the journey, so they can get up to 6 grams on the scale. It is thought that some of the little hummers overdo their weight gain goals and end up being too big to make the journey. Other hummingbirds that don’t migrate might not because they are too old or too young.

Hummingbirds will start the migration process at different times depending on where they live in the summer. Some will leave as early as July and the beginning of August. Others will wait until September. In fact, you might not even see any leave until October and November in some places. You don’t have to worry about taking your feeder down when it’s time for the hummingbirds to migrate, because they will do it on their own whether you have fresh nectar out or not. They are very smart and will sense the clues that it’s time to move on. When bugs are becoming scarce and disappearing all together, and flowers are no longer blooming, they’ll be ready to move on.

You’ll see your Ruby-throated hummingbird community return at the beginning of March if you live in the southern part of North America. The further north you go, the later it will be, so you’ll see them closer to April and May if you live in places near the Great Lakes, New York, and Alaska. As soon they arrive home from migration in the spring, they will refuel and then begin courting one another and building nests. It’s important that you provide a lot of nectar for them at this time.

Hummingbirds can travel across the entire Gulf of Mexico in one night, which is around 500 miles. Their migration can take as many as twenty-two hours or more of flight time. They will often travel an average of twenty-five miles a day and take breaks for a day to two weeks depending on how much rest and food they require to move on. They tend to fly low to the ground, just above the water and close to the tops of trees. Each hummingbird travels alone, and even though they may fly together, this is only because they are going in the same direction. It has nothing to do with them teaming up for the flight. They may also travel in a flock with other birds that are migrating, but once again, this is just due to the fact that so many birds are traveling and they just happened to be traveling at the same time.

There is a myth that hummingbirds travel on the backs of larger birds to take breaks and rest their wings, but this is not true. They fly the entire way with no breaks from other birds. If they see a place to stop that is in the ocean, they may take it to rest on such as oil rigs and other obstacles in the water. Some hummingbirds must travel across the dessert and it is a brutal journey no matter what route the birds are on.

It is thought that the male hummingbirds will arrive to their destinations before the females to set up a good area and keep other males out. The woman, depending on the age of their children, may travel with them. They’ll travel to Mexico and many locations in South America. The most species of hummingbirds is found in Ecuador. Their destinations will be tropical places that have plenty of flowers, insects, and spiders.

Pay attention to your hummingbird feeders during migration and keep nectar clean and fresh. While you might see a lot of your regular visitors leave and have very little action at your feeder, that doesn’t mean you won’t have a few late hummers come by. You may even become a place that hummingbirds that are traveling to the coast will stop in for a day or two to rest and refuel.

Migration seasons are a great time to add extra feeders, so you can accommodate all of the hummers that are trying to gain weight. They males won’t be as territorial when there is plenty of food. In the spring, the females will appreciate having nectar options in case one feeder is being guarded. Don’t forget, not all hummingbirds make it to migration for different reasons, so if you see one continue to linger at your feeder all year long, follow the rules for feeding them in the winter, keep their nectar warm, and have a plan for freezing weather.

The hottest hotel rooms right now are tents and RVs. Here's why big chains are all in on 'glamping'

• Hotel giants Hilton and Hyatt are growing their luxury camping portfolios.
• Both are adding glamping resorts to their booking channels, where their members can earn and redeem points.
• Interest in high-end camping has remained strong since its boom during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Forget high-rise hotels and all-inclusive beachfront resorts — the world's most popular hotel companies see a future in luxury tents.

If it seems like a third of your friends are going "glamping" these days — a portmanteau of glamorous and camping — you'd be correct. Luxury and traditional camping comprised 32% of all vacations in 2022, with more than 10 million households going on a glamping trip that year, according to campground giant Kampgrounds of America, or KOA.

Over the last few years, scores of boutique luxury camping properties have popped up around the US to meet growing demand, from Getaway's Instagram-famous matte black tiny cabins to RV-rental platform Outdoorsy's growing portfolio of luxury canvas tent resorts.

Now, hotel giants want a slice of the high-end camping pie.

Hilton and Hyatt are getting into glamping

Hilton and Hyatt have both recently announced partnerships and properties to expand their glamping portfolios.

Earlier this year, the former said its members could soon earn and use Hilton Honors points to book AutoCamp's chain of luxury campgrounds.

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The brand's resorts are best known for their stationary Airstream trailers turned hotel rooms , although they also offer "traditional" glamping accommodations like tiny homes and high-end canvas tents with beds.

It's Hilton's first move into the glamping industry. And it's starting with a pretty successful partner.

Like other glamping and camping properties, AutoCamp saw a boom in bookings during the COVID-19 pandemic as travelers shunned cruises, planes, and traditional hotels for road trips and the great outdoors (remember that?).

The glamping company has grown quickly: Four of its seven resorts launched after 2021, and two more locations are now underway.

Hilton hasn't disclosed how many points travelers need for an AutoCamp reservation or when they'll become available. Still, the glamping company isn't known to be as affordable as camping. In the summer, a weekend stay can range from about $300 to $670 a night.

For its part, Hyatt has taken the same approach as its opponent.

On Wednesday, the competing hotel giant announced World of Hyatt members can now earn and spend points at more than 700 of high-end hotel brand Mr and Mrs Smith's properties. This includes five of its 17 glamping resorts, like a bed under the stars in India's Pench National Park, and a thatched-roofed hut in Sri Lanka's Yala National Park.

Hyatt plans to add more Mr and Mrs Smith properties to its World of Hyatt collection every quarter. No word yet on whether it will include the high-end hotel brand's 12 other luxury camping resorts.

But if you think AutoCamp's Airstreams can get expensive, wait until you see Mr and Mrs Smith's glamping accommodations. The most expensive of the five — all-inclusive cabins in Dunton, Colorado — starts at $2,855 per night. The huts in Sri Lanka are, at their cheapest , $724 a night.

But the addition of these glamping resorts to its booking channels isn't Hyatt's first venture into glamping. The company's Alila Ventana Big Sur hotel in California also offers high-end canvas tents alongside conventional hotel rooms.

Hyatt is now using the same model to launch an adult-only expansion of its all-inclusive Dreams Curaçao resort, set to open in June. Alongside the Caribbean property's existing traditional hotel, Hyatt plans to deploy modular tiny-home-sized hotel room units directly on the beach.

Glamping could be a great investment for these hospitality giants.

Glamping was one of the biggest travel trends from the COVID-19 pandemic, and interest has yet to fade. In 2023, KOA called the industry an "aggressive growth segment," with four in 10 campers expressing interest in glamping that year.

According to the campground giant, compared to traditional campers and hotel guests, "glampers" spend more money daily at glamping properties and their surrounding areas — music to Hilton and Hyatt's ears.

Watch: Marriott International's Tina Edmundson tells Insider that the travel mindset has changed since the pandemic

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Joe and Katherine’s Bargain Holidays review – comedians slum it with a ‘spa day’ in a pub car park

Budget ice baths, graveyard sleepovers and a night of slam poetry in Norwich! Joe Wilkinson and Katherine Ryan are super fun as they hunt for adventures that don’t break the bank

C hannel 4 has carved out a particular niche in daytime-shaped TV shows airing at night. This largely means that an afternoon-ish format, of the sort that would usually be broken up with ads for life insurance, animal charities and conservatories, now comes with the added frisson of knowing that a well-known comedian might say a bad word – see, for example, Eight Out of 10 Cats Does Countdown. Here we are, then, in familiar territory, with Joe and Katherine’s Bargain Holidays, a strangely late-afternoon-meets-late-night travelogue from comedians Joe Wilkinson and Katherine Ryan , about how to enjoy a holiday on the cheap.

It was filmed in the summer of 2022 – that must be why England looks so green and pleasant, rather than soaked to the skin with six months’ worth of relentless rain – and bears the hallmarks of peak inflation, as it searches for the best means of getting away without breaking the bank. Wilkinson is the bargain-hunter here, while Ryan leans into her luxury-loving persona. Throughout her career, Ryan has always been refreshingly open about money, and here she continues to be frank, as she shrugs off any notion of embarrassment about splashing out on nice stuff. She’ll spend £500 on a spa day, she says, and £300 on dinner, or more, if she gets the train from London to Paris and back, just for a romantic meal with her husband. “I just don’t want to compromise on my lifestyle,” she says. “Shall we compromise for a bit?” asks Wilkinson. “No,” she replies.

But they do compromise. It’s a programme called Bargain Holidays, so that is the whole idea. The conceit for episode one is that they’re trying to have a romantic mini-break in Norfolk, where Norwich was recently voted “the most romantic city in the UK”. There are no luxury spa days here, however. There is a bargain spa day, put on by a pub that offers a variety of packages featuring activities such as paddleboarding, yoga while paddleboarding, an ice bath in the pub car park and a pint. Wilkinson whips out the first of many money-off vouchers, and gets 10% off, and everyone seems to be having a lovely day out. They spend the night cheaply “champing”, or camping in a church, in which the only real issues are whether it is appropriate to pee in the compost toilet next to the graveyard, and whether the bats will bother them while they sleep. Before they hole up for the night, they tuck in to a takeaway from the Too Good To Go app, which allows you to buy reduced-price food that would otherwise go to waste. The burrito that turns up is, appropriately for the church setting, a true revelation.

Despite the setup depending on odd-couple energy, Ryan has no qualms about “slumming” it and is open to pretty much everything, even if she compares the “champing” experience to the “hospitals in Chornobyl”. In the search for a free night out, they end up at a poetry open mic in Norwich. She even makes a decent slam poet, in the only section of the show that wouldn’t pass muster at teatime. The pair voucher and deal their way through several eating establishments, including one Italian that offers a bargain platter, if you accept having no choice in what you eat and the fact that what you get depends on the chef’s mood that day. “When does she start drinking?” Ryan quips. Wilkinson, meanwhile, makes the most of the romantic brief by pursuing his own interests entirely. His interests are owls, and paying to smash things up in a Rage Room. This counts as a bargain activity because it’s cheaper if you bring your own stuff to smash – although, amazingly, you do still have to pay to do it.

The show doesn’t hammer home the environmental credentials of a holiday without flying, possibly because they do fly in later episodes, but an attempt to visit a picturesque lavender field has a mini climate twist of its own: the owners had to harvest it all early, owing to the 2022 heatwave. The only reason Wilkinson and Ryan can get their purple-hued selfie is because the owners have left them a strip or two.

There aren’t many places left for the travelogue to go, both creatively and literally, although this is a perfectly fine addition to the genre. But I am preternaturally biased to enjoy a travel show like this, because this sort of holiday is right up my cobbled street. Give me owl sanctuaries and pub gardens and a 90-minute cruise on a frilly riverboat named Southern Comfort and I would consider myself rested, relaxed and very happy indeed.

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• Television & radio
• Katherine Ryan

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