Your Birding Month

Birds to look for this month include Red Kite, Coal Tit, House Martin and juvenile Long-eared Owl

NIGHTJAR

We are blessed with some extraordinary birds in the UK. But is there a stranger one than the Nightjar, the good old ‘Goatsucker’? Of course they are not so strange that they indulge in sucking at the teats of goats and cattle, as legend and ancient slander would have it. Better the name ‘ Bugeater’, as that is what Nightjars are really about.

This nocturnally flying, cryptically-patterned insect-eater is the only member of its family that occurs with any frequency in this country, but it belongs to a family with nearly 100 species, worldwide. And these are in turn included in the same order as the frogmouths, potoos, owletnightjars and the Oilbird (which is like a large, echo-locating nightjar).

They are not common birds, though, with about 4,600 singing males scattered rather thinly across suitable places (mainly heaths or recently clear-felled plantations), across our country. They appear from April onwards, staying to late summer (August), and this month is as good a month as any to see and hear one or more. And it is the seeing and hearing which lifts the Nightjar experience to another level. The song is a unique, mechanical yet musical, purring, so-called ‘ churr’; a continuous musical rattling like a lower frequency version of the Grasshopper Warbler’s song, but with shifts in pitch as the bird appears to breathe in and out. Males also have a croaky ‘ kooick’ call and indulge in a spot of wingclapping in display flight, ‘ flashing’ the white spots on the wing and outer tail at the same time.

The flight is light, buoyant and almost dancing, almost like one of those flying, flapping, wind-up toys rather than a real bird. Illustrations of flying birds just cannot convey the grace and magic of the Nightjar’s flight. See it for yourself, if your eyes can cope with the gloaming, as this is the only time you will see them hunting; on the cusp of darkness.