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Antillean Nighthawk | Chordeiles gundlachii
Antilliaanse nachtzwaluw | Añapero Querequeté
The Antillean Nighthawk is the nighthawk of the Greater Antilles and the Bahamas, a summer visitor that arrives in April and disappears again after the breeding season. Where the birds spend the winter is not known with certainty; they are thought to move to South America. In Cuba it is called querequeté, after its call. It was formerly considered a subspecies of Common Nighthawk Chordeiles minor.
Voice
The call is a dry, repeated pitty-pit-pit or killikadik, mostly heard in flight, the source of the local names querequeté and querebebé. In display the male dives with a booming sound, thinner and quieter than in Common Nighthawk.
Recording: Noah Khanti Steinberg — CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 · converted to mono · xeno-canto
Identification
20–23 cm, with long, pointed wings and a forked tail. The plumage is grey-brown, mottled with black, grey and white; there are grey and rufous birds. The underparts are barred on a whitish to buff ground. A white bar crosses the black primaries. On a perched bird the pale tertials contrast with the rest of the wing. The male has a white throat and a white band near the end of the tail; the female has a pale brown throat, a smaller wing patch and no tail band.
Confusion species
Common Nighthawk Chordeiles minor, which passes through in spring and autumn, is slightly larger and longer-winged, less buff below and lacks the pale tertials; the difference in call is the most reliable feature. Cuban Nightjar Antrostomus cubanensis and other forest nightjars have rounded wings without a white bar and do not hunt high in the air.
Habitat
Open country: savannas, pastures, cane fields, clearings and cut-over forest, coastal plains, beaches and airfields, also villages and towns. It hunts flying insects at dusk and sometimes by day. The egg is laid without a nest on bare ground, a stump or a flat gravel roof.
Where the bird is most at home, classified by the vegetation types of the Caribbean.
Range and movements
Breeds in the Bahamas, the Turks and Caicos Islands, Cuba with Isla de la Juventud, the Cayman Islands, Jamaica, Hispaniola, Puerto Rico and the Virgin Islands. There are records from the Lesser Antilles, but because of the similarity to Common Nighthawk its status there is unclear. A vagrant on Aruba and Curaçao. Outside the region it breeds in the Florida Keys and southern Florida.
- Summer visitor (c. Oct–Mar)
- Passage (Mar–Apr, Oct–Nov)
- dark = core range, pale = thinly spread
How and when to look
From May to August best at dusk over airfields, pastures and open ground near the coast; the birds call a lot in flight. On warm evenings they can also be seen over villages and towns.
Conservation status
Not threatened; the population is estimated at about 200,000 birds. In the Florida Keys and Florida numbers have fallen as open ground has been built over.
Scientific name
Chordeiles gundlachii | Lawrence, 1856
Lawrence described the species in 1856 and placed it straight away in the genus where it still stands. The genus Chordeiles was introduced in 1832 by Swainson. Chordeiles is Greek, from khoreia 'dance' and deilē 'evening', after the dancing hunting flights at dusk. gundlachii honours the German-Cuban naturalist Juan (Johannes) Gundlach (1810–1896). The specimen the first description was based on came from Cuba.