Nightjars for the Uninitiated
What is a nightjar? For those of you that have simply stumbled your way here from the great expanses of the internet and are wondering to yourselves "what is a nightjar?" then this is the post for you! Nightjars are birds in the order Caprimulgiformes and family Caprimulgidae , but if you have little interest in scientific classification, the basic summary is that nightjars are the nocturnal gremlins of the bird world. Various nightjars have earned a smattering of expressive names like liche fowl , 鬼鸟 ( ghost bird ), cuerporruin ( despicable body ), and Satanic Nightjar , the latter of which has been attributed to its call sounding like "pulling out a person’s eye" . Those names alone are plenty to give you a sense of the spooky and ominous reputations they have in folklore. Having spent as much time as I have with nightjars, I can see why they earned that reputation. After all, they stare at you like this: "Rock Demon," Eastern Whip-poor-will (New York...