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Nightjar News Volume 4 Issue 2
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Contents

WildResearch Nightjar Survey
1. 2018 survey sign up
2. Put your data on eBird!


Research & Conservation
1. Moths & moonlight
2. Nighthawks eat beetles


Fun Feature
1. eBird Migration Wave
Hi Nightjar Enthusiasts,
 
Hope everyone is having a great spring! This is just a short edition to announce the beginning of route sign-up for the 2018 nightjar survey season, including all the new routes in Ontario, PEI, and Nova Scotia. The nightjars are on their way back to the breeding grounds, so adopt a route and get ready to survey!

Nocturnally yours,

Elly Knight
WildResearch Nightjar Survey Program Manager


 

WildResearch Nightjar Survey News

1. 2018 Survey Season Sign Up

This edition of the Nightjar News is to announce that official sign-up begins today, May! You can sign up for a nightjar survey route by visiting the Nightjar Atlas at www.nightjar.ca.

  1. Navigate to your area of interest
  2. Hover your cursor over an available route (yellow)
  3. Click on the “here” link in the small pop up window
  4. Login or register
  5. Choose how long you want to adopt the route for
If you're having trouble with route adoption, please email Elly at nightjars@wildresearch.ca. The survey protocol will be identical to last year as we continue to follow the Canadian Nightjar Survey Protocol. The protocol is available on the WildResearch website in English and French here. We'll send out further details on how to survey closer to the survey season.

For those of you in areas where you might detect Common Poorwill or Eastern Whip-poor-will, the preferred survey dates within a week of the full moon will be June 20 to July 6 for 2018. You can view the "Survey1WeekofFullMoon" layer on the atlas to determine whether you're an area that may have Common Poorwill or Eastern Whip-poor-will. 


2. Put your data on eBird!

Hey! Do you know about eBird? If not, eBird is the world’s largest biodiversity-related citizen science project, with more than 100 million bird sightings contributed each year! eBird collect checklists from birders around the world, makes those data freely available, and develops super cool data-driven approaches to science, conservation and education. You can learn more about eBird here.

If you already knew about eBird, did you know that you can double the impact of your nightjar survey data by reporting it on the Nightjar Atlas AND on eBird? The two datasets have different but valuable purposes! We encourage all our volunteers to report their observations on eBird as well as to us. You can even use eBird Mobile in realtime while you conduct your survey!


Nightjar Conservation & Research News

1. Moths & moonlight

Hot off the press today! Philina English and her co-authors published the last chapter of her PhD thesis in the journal Ecology and Evolution. Philina spent many hours searching for the elusive nests of the Eastern Whip-poor-will. She tracked the timing and survival of those nests relative to when moths were most abundant and when the moon was most full. She found that chick survival was lowest when moonlight was high and moth abundance was low. She also found evidence that nightjars were able to adjust their nest timing to compensate for mismatch with food supply by undertaking a longer breeding season.

English PA, Nocera JJ, Green DJ. Nightjars may adjust breeding phenology to compensate for mismatches between moths and moonlight. Ecol Evol. 2018;00:1–15. https://doi.org/10.1002/ece3.4077

Read the full article online here.

 


The hypothetical mismatch scenarios proposed for Eastern Whip-poor-will.



2. Boreal nighthawks eat beetles

Available early online in the Wilson Journal of Ornithology, Elly Knight & her coauthors have published a short article about the diet of Common Nighthawks in Canada's boreal forest. The team collected samples of food from the mouths of adult birds and identified their contents to document what nighthawks are eating in the boreal forest. They found that the food samples were overwhelmingly comprised of longhorn and carabid beetles, which is unsurprising for a species that occupies post-wildfire areas in the boreal forest.

Elly C. Knight, Janet W. Ng, Caitlin E. Mader, R. Mark Brigham, and Erin M. Bayne (2018) “An inordinate fondness for beetles”: first description of Common Nighthawk (Chordeiles minor) diet in the boreal biome. The Wilson Journal of Ornithology In-Press.

The article is available here.


Longhorn beetle prey consumed by Common Nighthawks in the boreal forest.


Fun Feature
 
1. Watch the Common Nighthawk migration wave on eBird

One of the great things about eBird is that you can see the migration wave of a particular species across time by revisiting their species maps day after day or month after month. Below is the difference in Common Nighthawk sightings between March and April of this year! You can see that the species is just starting to show up in the southeastern USA, with a couple keeners out ahead of the pack and nearing the Canadian border!

You can continue to track Common Nighthawk migration on eBird here.

 
 
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