Monday, July 4, 2022

Common Nighthawk Dive Bomb


A beautiful short video of the "Skeezix bird" swooping, diving and "booming" in pink and golden clouds. The bird even flies right at the camera as he dives - and at the very end, we see a rainbow. 

I'm finding out more about this bird, which I THINK I can hear at night in Port Coquitlam - but it's too far away to hear the "boom". They're sometimes called "bullbats" because of the swift, darting way they fly (and the booming dives). They're not even hawks, but more closely related to a species called a nightjar. Fierce little creatures.

Nightjars are medium-sized nocturnal or crepuscular birds in the family Caprimulgidae /ˌkæprɪˈmʌldʒɪdiː/ and order Caprimulgiformes, characterised by long wings, short legs, and very short bills. They are sometimes called goatsuckers, due to the ancient folk tale that they sucked the milk from goats (the Latin for goatsucker is caprimulgus), or bugeaters, their primary source of food being insects. Some New World species are called nighthawks. The English word "nightjar" originally referred to the European nightjar.

(GOATSUCKERS??)