Grey Nightjar

How to identify

Field marks

1. Large head and eyes, long tail and weak bill; short-legged
2. Conspicuous white patch on the throat
3. Conspicuous black streak along the center of the crown
4. Male has white patches near the tips of the outer tail feathers

Male, female and young

The female has similar but slightly paler plumage, a smaller white throat patch and no white patches on the middle of the flight feathers or on the tail feathers.

Voice

A series of hollow “byuck” calls lasting 2–4 seconds, repeated at short intervals, like a cartoon laser gun.

Where and when it's recorded

Grey Nightjar has been recorded at 594 of the 8,171 birding hotspots we track, in 18 countries and regions.

Records by month Northern Hemisphere

Where it's recorded most

1. Bukit FraserMalaysia96 records
2. Man Nai IslandThailand78 records
3. Nanhui DongtanChina65 records

Countries and regions with the most records

ChinaThailandSingaporeMalaysiaVietnamIndiaBhutanNepal

eBird records via GBIF up to 2024-12-31. A record means someone listed it; more records partly mean more birders, not more birds.

About

The grey nightjar (Caprimulgus jotaka; also "gray" in some non-local literature) is a species of nightjar found in East Asia, breeding from southeastern Russia south through China, the Korean Peninsula and Japan to northern Indochina and westward along the Himalayas. It is largely migratory, wintering in Indochina south to Java in Indonesia, but is resident in warmer areas in the south of its breeding range. It is sometimes treated as a subspecies of the jungle nightjar (C. indicus), its South Asian relative.

Excerpt from Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 4.0 · authors · Read more on Wikipedia

Questions