62 thoughts on “Spot the nightjar”

  1. Fantastic! I couldn’t find it until I clicked on the picture to expand it. Truly amazing camouflage and a really wonderful bird.

      1. The trick I use, learnt while spotting tawny frogmouths, is to look for the beak and/or the closed eye. Even so, this is such good camo I had to look at the enlargement to be sure I was right.

      2. He’s between those two leaves – the brown ones. No, not that one, to the right, to the right. And down a bit.

        Seriously, though, I couldn’t find it either, until I hacked into the NSA and borrowed a satellite and a couple of drones. They won’t mind, will they? 🙂

      1. I still don’t see it!

        Dang it…I don’t even know what a nightjar is supposed to look like!

      2. Damned christian gods! The nightjar must have flown away just as I was downloading the picture.

        1. Oh! Its back now but, I already looked at that leafish branchy thing and dismissed it as not a bird.

    1. Yes, for a moment i thought i saw the turtle near lower right corner and the bird a little above it. Now i canz’t find either…

  5. Got it, but that took a while. For a while I was contemplating that this could just be a pix of dead leaves, and a psychology experiment.
    Clever that it closes its eyes.

    1. Darn! Now I wish I’d timed myself. Pretty sure it took me no more than that, though. Having an idea of what to look for helped.

      I picked out the tail first.

  8. Found it in about 15 seconds of scanning at full size. But then spent another minute or so making sure. Very well hidden. A tail feather is what made it clearly evident to me. When I first spotted the head I wasn’t 100% sure.

    2. Played “Where’s the Nightjar?” as a monkey, and missed a meal or three. After playing came back and found and it quickly. This primate does not like being hungry.

      1. I chose mongoose, just to be contrarian. Wonder what difference it makes? Will have to wait till the website co-operates for me.

    3. Hmm, maybe we’ve overloaded that site. After getting the first one quickly (I presume they start with easy ones), the second picture never loaded…

  11. Looks like a pauraque but nightjars look much alike…

    Nightjars are among my favorite birds. We have five species here, so there are several opportunities for nightjar-spotting throughout the year. In June I was fortunate to hear (and SEE! Yay!) a rare buff-collared nightjar (I prefer its informal names, “cookacheea” or “tucuchillo”).

  12. I think I spotted it. It was tough and I would not be surprised if I am wrong. But that does look like its tail feather.

  13. I see the one everyone else is seeing, plus I see two more (albeit slightly smaller). It’s either a nest or I’m seeing things that aren’t there.

      1. Upper right corner. On my page (before enlargement), the dot for “Indie Bound” is right above the head of one “bird”. The other is due left of that.

  14. I’m curious about the location and the species. Here in southern Ohio we have Whip-poor-wills and (rarely) Chuck-wills-widows. When I encounter (by lucky chance) Whip-poor-wills on a nest, they don’t flush until the very last moment, then move only a few feet and engage in a distraction display. The eggs are as hard to see as the bird! Does this species have a similar behavior?

    1. Go dead center, then slightly up, then to the left until you come to a twig that’s standing straight up. To the left of that twig is the bird.

    2. It’s much lower down than mordacious1 thinks

      Don’t want to spoil it for you though 🙂

      I will say it’s sitting in the leaf litter horizontally from our POV with the head facing left & tail pointed to the right side of the frame & canted up. Slitted eye of the birdie is horizontal

      1. Oh great. Now I see 4 birds, it’s beginning to look like an Alfred Hitchcock movie. I saw that one before, but thought “center bird” looked more like a bird.

    3. Ben, might help if you do a Google image search or the like to get an idea of what to look for…then look for either the closed eye, the wing bar, or the ‘stacked’ primaries of the folded wing…

    4. I actually found the feathers first. Look for that pattern that stands out slightly from the leaves.

  22. Ooh,I know: Spot (the nightjar, I assume that’s his name) is inside the Gaboon viper.

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