Colin Travers’s day job is in McGovern’s pub in Gorey, Co Wexford. By night he searches remote areas across the county for a secretive bird assumed extinct in Ireland: the nightjar. Travers spends his spare time with an older family friend, Miley Finn, who remembers hearing the distinctive “churring” call of the nightjar back in the 1960s. Finn hadn’t seen or heard one since the 1980s, but he always told Travers that one day it would return.
Nightjars are elusive and only active at night, but the male’s distinctive churring, whirring call – a bit like a loud, rapidly purring cat or a spinning wheel in constant motion (hence their Irish name “túirne lín”) – is so noticeable that it will give them away to anyone nearby. This unmistakable sound was described by the poet William Wordsworth as “the spirit of a toil-worn slave/ Lashed out of life, not quiet in the grave”. A few decades ago it would have been heard in places where they thrive, such as semi-wooded habitats, heathlands and moorlands, and young plantations. But, over time, as land use changed, their survival was threatened, and the sound was silenced.
But in the summer of 2022, Travers’s friend John Been, a local who had got into the evening habit of recording the sound of birdsong during his walks, told Travers that he had heard an unusual bird call, playing it back on his phone. Travers knew immediately it was a nightjar. The next evening, he and Finn visited the area where Been was walking, and from a distance they heard the churring sound of a male nightjar. As they approached, the nightjar flew up and flicked his tail in midair. It was, Travers said, “like winning the lottery”.
A concerted effort in Wales to increase the nightjar’s numbers has been successful
Nightjars are the swallows of the night, feasting on up to a thousand large moths and other insects on the wing from the moment they appear in the evening, after a day spent sitting still on the woodland or heathland floor, trying not to be seen by potential predators. They rely on camouflage to keep them hidden; their brown, bark-like, marbled plumage allows them to melt into the background in the leafy understory; when in danger, they will almost freeze to blend in.
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Nightjars spend winter 6,500km away in subtropical Africa before departing to Ireland to breed in May. Earlier this year Travers was told that a single nightjar had been spotted on the Saltee Islands, and he predicted it was on a migration route home to Wexford. He was right. In May he and Finn recorded a pair of nightjars, which went on to successfully breed.
The work was part of a publicly funded survey commissioned by Wexford and Kilkenny county councils and the National Parks & Wildlife Service. No nightjars were found in Kilkenny, but there are probably more pairs that have yet to be recorded. Crepuscular species such as nightjars are expensive and labour-intensive to survey (the sites can be remote) but researchers and volunteers such as Travers and Finn are increasingly using technologies such as acoustic devices and drone thermal sensors to do the listening and watching instead.
The female can display infanticidal and cannibalistic tendencies, as shown live last year on BBC’s Springwatch, when the presenters showed an undoubtedly astonished audience a somewhat horrifying scene. A female nightjar sits on the woodland floor tending to two eggs underneath her. The first chick arrives safely, and the father feeds it a regurgitated meal of partially digested insects. By 3am, the second egg hatches and a healthy-looking chick emerges – only for the mother to eat it alive, swallowing the chick down in one.
The clearly baffled presenters theorise why a nightjar would do this; could the chick have had a congenital defect? No conclusive answers are offered, and audiences are left with a final shot of the surviving chick nestled under a satiated and strangely content-looking mother.
The confirmation of a breeding pair in Wexford revives the question of whether nightjars could have a more hopeful future in Ireland. A concerted effort in Wales to increase their numbers – including the restoration of lowland habitats, maintaining spaces of open forest where they hunt for food, and using livestock like cattle to graze down overgrown vegetation – has been successful.
Maintaining a rotation of young forests and open areas will encourage them to breed, as will the reduction in pesticide use to ensure an abundance of moths, beetles and other night-flying insects. As ground-nesting birds, nightjars are vulnerable to predation and disturbance by dogs off the lead.
For Travers, using technology such as sound recorders is a huge help. But this summer he and Finn still ventured out nearly every evening to search for them. Next year, they’ll be out again in early May, hoping to catch the sound of the nightjar’s churring call.