These things have been active the past few evenings, at dusk, in a large undeveloped area just to the southeast of my place…

Two things startle me about the photo up top. First, the surprisingly intricate and ornate color patterning of the bird’s feathers. And second, the fact that this creature was snapped by someone in sunny broad daylight. The bird is called a nighthawk in common speech, and they are quite common in North America, including as I have just come to learn, Canada. To give you a sense of scale it is only about 9-10 inches long, but its wingspan easily doubles that length. It is not actually a hawk despite the popular name, and makes its living catching insects on the wing. These birds are spectacularly acrobatic. Especially now – mating season. It seems that one of their flirtation strategies has to do with displays of aerial daredevilry. The visuals on this bird are so dramatic, up close, that it almost seems a cruel joke they are so difficult to spot except for a dark brown racing blur. Yet — they do rest apparently, as the image below proves, And when still their appearance shape-shifts into a nondescript blob. Which weapons designers apparently were impressed enough by that they named their F-117 stealth fighter after the bird.

I’m not an ardently avid “birder”, first off, but I have paid attention to the natural world enough in life to have seen and ID’d over 200 different avian species (which only represents a bit more than 25% of the potential total for North America). Whereas to a serious birdwatcher nighthawks are fairly common and therefore somewhat ho-hum, for me they are exceptional and still produce a jolt of joie-de-vivre. There have been three nighthawk sighting occasions in my life that I can recall. First time was maybe forty years back in New Jersey one night. A lady, kind enough but technically not so talented, had just been appointed my boss, and we stood shooting the breeze in a parking lot after some corporate pizza dinner. While she labored to reassure me that “I’ll always do right by you, Rob” I noticed a repeating fly-by, quite a distance overhead of an incredibly agile bird doing wide ovals with a sleek wingspan and lighter colored stripes beneath its otherwise dark wings which got caught in the glow of the parking lot’s tall streetlamps. You have to understand that in those days, if I spotted a new-to-me bird species about 98% of my attention would fly thither while I absorbed all the sense data I could. For fun and for looking it up later at home. The other 2% I half-heartedly allocated to the conversation with the new boss. She probably always wondered why I was constantly looking up during our heart-to-heart. A few months later I left that job when I learnt that a colleague in the same department earned 15K more than me even though he was clearly inferior workwise (though more active politically). In those days, the 80s, the chief mechanism for growing your salary in the software sphere was switching jobs, since for some reason most firms thought it wise to restrict annual raises to 5% or so. HR never made any sense to me.

Some Further Nighthawk Trivia:
1) They have really effective camouflage for those risky off-wing (or sleeping) moments.
2) They can open their mouths unnaturally wide for hoovering up insects in flight.

The second and third personal nighthawk spottings happened for me during the past few days, including an hour ago. Normal people, the ones who pay little attention to such matters, don’t generally realize that sound is as useful for bird species identification as sight. I had the windows wide open this evening and it was the call of the nighthawk which led me to recognize it. It’s fairly distinctive and not easily confused with another bird. You can listen to these vocalizations in the short video below which gives a nice quick overview about nighthawk sightings in Oregon. The second video gives a more detailed look at nighthawk behavior and characteristics. Aside from this evening, about two or three dusks ago I was outside and saw one flying around. Their silhouette in flight is quite unmistakable. Very nice bird. If i’m lucky the early males will soar expertly enough to drive some lady nighthawk into a swoon and perhaps May and June will see a local family of them as a result. Helps with the insect control. 🙂

Check out the nighthawk’s sonic boom:

_______RS

[ Images: details from various nature websites… I’m not good enough to produce these photographs, honest. ]

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