Birding is essentially a diurnal pursuit, but not when the bird on the watch list is a wide-eyed nyctophile. And certainly not when the nightjar is in the picture. The bird retires for a good day’s sleep at the first flush of morning. So, when a birder’s day begins, the nightjar’s ends.
Combine somnolence during the day with an ability to blend inscrutably into its surroundings — be it a tree bark, a muddy pathway or leaf litter — and the net result is a bird less seen, and understood lesser still.
On a slightly tangential note, during a conversation, ornithologist V Santharam remarked about the nightjar’s gift for camouflage: “The nightjar is so confident of its camouflage that it would take to wing at the last moment, when the person’s foot is closing in on it.”
In hindsight, these two factors — nocturnality and “camouflage-ability” — have kept a nightjar species off the Chennai checklist.
Being nocturnal and crepuscular, the nightjar is usually heard, and rarely seen. It takes diehard birders and a torch to venture into the dark and put feathers to the calls. Three diehards did just that and their effort has now widened our understanding of the nightjar presence in and around Chennai.
Gnanaskandan Kesavabharathi, Chandrashekar Sundaram and P Selva Singh Richard heard and then spotted a Jerdon’s Nightjar at Madras Christian College close to two years ago. The sighting upturned certain notions about where the bird could be found.
“The Jerdon’s Nightjar is known as the ‘ghats nightjar’, being typically found on hillocks and on the fringes of hill scrubs. We stumbled upon this bird at MCC, and we were surprised to find it there,” says Chandrashekar. It might however be argued that the MCC campus is close to Vandalur with its hillocks. While this argument could be pursued, the trio were pursuing another line of thought. Chandrashekar notes that previous sightings of the Jerdon’s nightjar have invariably been in environments marked by a mixture of hilly and scrub-lined terrain. The bird is identified with the eastern ghats, and sightings have been reported from Vellore.
In a paper they presented to Indian Birds, and which was promptly accepted and published, the trio underlined how scarce the bird is in the “coastal plains of Tamil Nadu”, which made the sighting in Tambaram remarkable. At that time, that sighting seemed a tough act to follow. However, contrary to expectations, sightings of the Jerdon’s nightjar seem to have become fairly regular and even easier than expected since the trio clapped eyes on the bird on the campus.
A word from Salim Ali
“We understood the habitat and started looking for it in the Vandalur, Thiruporur to Chengelpet areas with their scrub jungles and we spotted this bird in three to four places. These places mostly had scrub and the hillocks were really small.”
Gnanaskandan describes the observed pattern of the species’ habitat: “Small hillocks covered with scrubs and plains.”
One possible conclusion derived primarily from the Tambaram sighting is that the Jerdon’s nightjar is not averse to inhabiting the plains as long as they can have their “preferred home” well fixed in sight. Gnanaskandan notes that they had seen the bird at Kumili,which lies in the Guduvancheri region, Madhuramangalam, a few kilometres from Kumili and Kattur, which is in the Thiruporur to Chengalpet belt.
