Buff-collared Nightjar Photograph and Sound Recording
(mirror-pole.com updated 4/13/99)
Photo by Jim Burns, August 1998
The Buff-collared Nightjar is a bird that flies with its mouth open to catch insects. Active at night, this bird is usually only seen in the daytime when flushed from a hiding spot on the ground or from a nest site on the ground. Much more common in Mexico, this bird is expanding its range northward so that it can now be found close to the US border with Mexico. In the 1980's the bird could also be found at Arivaipa Canyon. However, we performed a 12-month survey at both the east and west ends (and in the interior) of the canyon in 1996 and were not able to locate the bird. The bird shown in the photograph was located during survey work on the Arizona Breeding Bird Atlas project, administered by Arizona Game and Fish. Note the large amount of white on the underside of the tail feathers (retrices). The male has much more white than the female and this can be used to identify the sex of the bird in the photograph (which is a male). The sound recording available for downloading was made at the same location as the photograph, but two months earlier, on May 23, 1998.
The original Buff-collared Nightjar sound recording was produced using a Sennheiser MKH70 shotgun microphone and the audio was stored on a 48 ksps DAT using a Tascam DA-P1 digital audio recorder. The recording was down-sampled to 44.1 ksps and converted to MPEG3 to reduce the file size to 481k bytes.The distance from the microphone to the bird is unknown, but is probably 15 - 20 feet.
Copyright Greg Clark, 1998
update 8/2012
