Eurasian nightjar

Voice

A sustained mechanical churr, a wooden rrrrrrrrrr running on for minutes and switching pitch every few seconds, as though a gas burner were being turned up and down. It starts about twenty minutes after sunset, continues long past midnight and returns before dawn. As the bird launches, the churr breaks off into a nasal coo-ick, often with audible wing-claps.

Identification

Long-winged and long-tailed, with a flat head, huge dark eyes and a tiny bill above an enormous gape. The plumage is grey-brown with intricate vermiculation, perfect camouflage. Males show white spots in the primaries and white tail corners, which females lack. In flight the falcon-like, buoyant and utterly silent action is distinctive.

Confusion species

In silhouette a Kestrel or Cuckoo can mislead, but the Nightjar flies with jerky, irregular beats and sudden veering turns, changing direction while apparently gliding. In southern Europe Red-necked Nightjar is the real trap: paler, sandier, with white primary spots in both sexes and a wholly different knocking song.

Habitat

Dry, warm, half-open ground: heathland with scattered pines, young plantations, clear-fells, inland dunes and the edges of pine forest on sandy soil. It lays without a nest on bare ground among heather or litter. Hunts moths and beetles over clearings, along woodland edges and above grazing livestock in open country.

Range and movements

Breeds across almost all of Europe to Scandinavia and winters in southern Africa. In the Netherlands it is concentrated on the Veluwe, the Utrecht ridge, the Brabant and Drenthe heaths and in the coastal dunes. In Spain it breeds in the north and centre, replaced southwards by Red-necked Nightjar.

• Breeding (summer)
• Passage
• Migration direction
• dark = core range, pale = thinly spread

Where and when to look

Between mid-May and late July pick a still, warm evening, walk out onto heathland and wait in a clearing until roughly half an hour after sunset. Stand quietly and listen; the churr betrays the song post. The male will often come to inspect you, clapping its wings as it circles overhead.

Conservation status

In the Netherlands numbers have recovered from a deep trough in the 1980s thanks to heathland restoration and large-scale forest conversion. Elsewhere in western Europe the species suffers from scrub encroachment and nitrogen enrichment of heaths, the loss of large moths, night-time recreation and collisions on unlit forest roads.