White-throated Nightjar

Nightjars are nocturnal and hunt insects on the wing at night. By day they rest on the ground where their feather patterns provide incredible camouflage making them near impossible to find unless they are flushed. When flushed they will often fly only a short distance before settling back on the ground. However unless this is an open situation and you see exactly where they land, then the chance of locating them without further flushing is near impossible. From my experience on the second flush they tend to fly much further and this is the last you will see of them.

Obviously finding a nightjar to photograph by day requires a lot of luck and therefore one cannot plan this but must rely on taking advantage of rare opportunities when they come along.

Recently I have been visiting an area of mangroves on the Brunswick River near Brunswick Heads in northern NSW primarily looking for Collared Kingfishers (1). On my last visit as I approached the edge of the mangroves through redgum and paperbark woodland with a tangled understory of grasses, vines and shrubs, a moderately large and dark bird flushed from the ground ahead of me and flew raptor-like a short distance to a long dead trunk of a tree lying in the mangroves where I saw it land.

Please click on photos to enlarge.

My first priority was to get a photo for ID purposes even though the light was mostly against me.

A check of the photo on the camera and given my location on the eastern seaboard of Australia, confirmed that this was a White-throated Nightjar (Eurostopodus mystacalis) – the white throat is obvious in the above photo. 

There are two other Nightjars found in Australia, the Spotted (Eurostopodus argus) and the Large-tailed (Caprimulgus macrurus) – neither are likely to be found at Brunswick Heads as suggested by the Birdata records. “The Australian Bird Guide” by Menkhorst et al contains a good summary description of nightjars in general and the three Australian birds in particular.

I then decided to backtrack and work my way around to a more favourable light angle for some more photos hoping the bird would remain on the tree trunk, however given the exposed location and full late afternoon sunlight on the subject, I was thinking the bird would not remain there long.

Fortunately the bird stayed long enough for me to get to a reasonable light position and take six photos with a change of exposure value after a few shots to compensate for over exposure of the subject in the strong late afternoon light.

The above photo was taken at -1.0ev

The above photo was taken at -1.67ev - it has a slightly richer colour.

While the subject’s long wings and tail are out of focus due to angle and depth of field, I am happy with these shots of a bird one rarely sees, let alone has an opportunity to photograph. The bird soon took flight giving me a good look at its back and top side as it arched in a short banking glide into the dense cover of the mangroves. 

Later I contemplated just how rare finding and photographing a Nightjar is. A check of Birdata records for the White-throated, Spotted and Large-tailed Nightjars gives the following numbers:

White-throated 2709 sightings 

Spotted 3488 sightings 

Large-tailed 1993 sightings

All three Nightjar sightings 8190

Comparing the combined sighting records with another perhaps more familiar and more frequently encountered nocturnal bird, the Owlet Nightjar, - which has 19431 Birdata records - gives a ratio of 2.4 more sightings for the Owlet Nightjar compared with all of the sightings for the three Nightjars. Given Owlet Nightjar encounters are few and far between the above numbers show how rare it is to find a Nightjar much less take photos. So I feel very lucky to have captured some photos of this White-throated Nightjar.

Note (1) The Collared Kingfisher has or is about to be named the Torresian Kingfisher after the Australian sub species of Collared has recently been declared a new species - refer notes in the Menkhorst et al Australian Bird Guide.