As talked about in lots of different posts on this weblog, the avifauna of Trinidad & Tobago consists of a number of species and household teams occurring very apparently, in threes. I hadn’t observed this till I started compiling my very own guide on the birds of T&T some years in the past, and I believed it moderately uncanny. The final time I spoke about this was over a 12 months in the past, and if you happen to’re doubting the prevalence of this, check out this record:
Bitterns | Trogons | Antshrikes | Spinetails | Manakins | Hermits | Honeycreepers | Warblers | Myiarchus
Over the previous few days now we have been having fun with every day – or ought to I say nightly – sightings of Brief-tailed Nighthawk. A pair has been roosting close to to the place we’re at present residing, and every night these cryptic birds take to the wing in quest of flying bugs. I’ve been unable to discover a day roost regardless of my greatest efforts. Photographing these nocturnal rockets has confirmed to be fairly the problem, I don’t assume I’ve ever furiously deleted so many photos in my life.
Brief-tailed Nighthawk (above and under)
General, this species appears to be poorly identified, which is comprehensible given its habits. Usually, they await the solar to be comfortably under the horizon earlier than rousing in any method. They haven’t been noticed to name from the roost; a single chicken silently takes to the wing, dropping virtually vertically out of its roost tree. It then flies round for a couple of minutes till it’s joined by the second chicken; that is when the vocalizations start. Over the course of normally the subsequent twenty minutes (or nevertheless lengthy it takes for darkness to tightly grip the scene) the pair chases bugs and one another, all of the whereas making quite a lot of chirps and buzzes.
Photographing the Brief-tailed Nighthawks concerned workouts firstly in monitoring their fast, erratic and extremely bat-like flight, and secondly in processing the remaining photos as soon as 99.99% had been deleted.
One night whereas trying on the nighthawks, I famous the presence of a 3rd chicken. Equally sized and proportioned to the nighthawks, this one determined to perch on an uncovered snag. Unbelievable, I believed – was this my likelihood to lastly land an honest picture of this species? To my bare eyes within the darkness its cream throat appeared a little bit off for a nighthawk, however maybe it was a juvenile? As soon as I appeared by way of correct glass nevertheless, all doubt was blown to smithereens – it was a Bat Falcon.
When this Bat Falcon departed this perch, it made the Brief-tailed Nighthawks appear to be they had been working on low-octane gas.
All of this to say that lastly I’ve documented all three species of nighthawk present in T&T. Properly, sort of. A pair years in the past some birders photographed an odd trying nighthawk that was inside a small flock of Lesser Nighthawks; this chicken is but to be recognized however is both Antillean or Frequent Nighthawk. For my egocentric functions of accumulating threes, I’m not together with this thriller right here.
The primary Lesser Nighthawks I noticed had been from a mall carpark; the birds would collect in nice quantity to feast on the numerous bugs attracted by the nauseating (to me) floodlights. I attempted photographing them at the moment; the outcomes had been embarrassing.
A few years later, I heard of one other group of Lesser Nighthawks that had converged on a close-by wetland. After a failed try and discover a day roost, I attempted one other morning with a special technique. Arriving within the darkness of the pre-dawn, I merely waited for the birds to return to their roost. I want life was at all times this simple.
Lesser Nighthawk
Rounding off the three is the most important of the bunch, the mighty Nacunda Nighthawk. This was truly the primary nighthawk I noticed correctly, a few years in the past at daybreak. Over the course of the subsequent decade, they’ve been pretty common guests to a wetland within the south of Trinidad and are one of many simpler nocturnal species to look at throughout the precise time of 12 months.
Nacunda Nighthawk
It should be famous that no calls or different lures had been used to {photograph} any of those birds, and that sleeping birds had been left in place to relaxation for so long as they desired.