{"id":2257,"date":"2010-08-03T17:47:50","date_gmt":"2010-08-03T23:47:50","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/earbirding.com\/blog\/?p=2257"},"modified":"2016-11-25T08:21:33","modified_gmt":"2016-11-25T14:21:33","slug":"rattles-claps-burp-clicks","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/earbirding.com\/blog\/archives\/2257","title":{"rendered":"Rattles, Claps, & Burp-clicks"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"\"<\/a>
Buff-collared Nightjar. Photo courtesy of Manuel Balcazar Lara (click for link).<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Perhaps the single species I most wanted to audio record on my recent trip to Sonora was the Buff-collared Nightjar.\u00a0 I posted last year<\/a> about the mystique of hearing this bird north of the Mexican border, where it is extremely local and rare.\u00a0 In southern Sonora, by contrast, it is abundant, and I heard its pr\u00e9stame-tu-cuchillo<\/em> song every single night of the trip.<\/p>\n

Although the song of the species is well known, its other sounds are not.\u00a0 The Birds of North America account<\/a> on this species says “Calls, typical of genus, are various chuck <\/em>or clucking notes; and quirr<\/em>. Calls very similar to those given by Whip-poor-will. No known recordings of calls. Female known to give only chuck <\/em>calls or clucking; no song. … Not known to wing-clap as other caprimulgids do.”\u00a0 Howell and Webb’s Mexican field guide says that calls include “a low, clucking chuuk <\/em>and kruk kruk, kruk<\/em>…, and harder, clucking chatters.”\u00a0 These descriptions give the impression that Buff-collareds may have a pretty impressive call repertoire, but without recordings, of course, it’s difficult to be sure.<\/p>\n

I am pleased to share with you a couple of cool audio clips that may help resolve (or perhaps merely deepen) the mysteries surrounding the calls of the Buff-collared Nightjar.\u00a0 The first was recorded in 1986 and resides in the archives of the Macaulay Library.\u00a0 It was recorded by Geoff Keller, one of the foremost nature sound recordists in America, and the first four minutes of it are probably the finest recording I’ve heard of Buff-collared’s primary song<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Right at the end of the cut, something remarkable happens:<\/p>\nhttp:\/\/earbirding.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2010\/08\/BCNIwingclapdisplay-LNS40510.mp3<\/a><\/audio>\n

(Click here<\/a> to hear the original<\/em>)<\/p>\n

The first time I heard this, I thought that Geoff’s microphone had rolled downhill right in the middle of one of the bird’s song strophes.\u00a0 It sounded like a mechanical failure of the sound equipment.\u00a0 But after listening carefully a second time, I realized that the crickets in the background keep chirping undisturbed throughout the disturbance and after.\u00a0 I did a little research and discovered that Curtis Marantz, another fine sound recordist, had listened to the same cut before me and added some notes to Cornell’s database: “The recording concludes with what appears to be a series of wing-claps and some clucking or clicking calls (if not a noise produced by the wings).”<\/p>\n

At first I was somewhat skeptical of this claim, since wing-clapping hadn’t been reported from the species, and also because of the bizarre nature of the sound, which alternated low “claps” with higher “rattles.”\u00a0 But then I contacted Geoff Keller by email to ask him about the circumstances surrounding this recording, and he replied:<\/p>\n

You have hit upon one of my most memorable recordings of my entire career….\u00a0 As for the sounds at the end of the recording, I too agree they are wing-claps. I have now since heard many similar wing-clap sounds from other members of the Nightjar family.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Even more interesting is what Geoff witnessed after the end of the recording:<\/p>\n

After the bird ended his series of territorial calls, the presumed male flies away (that is when the wing-claps are heard). However, the bird wasn’t finished. It circled around and landed once again just a few meters in front of me. There apparently was a female present, and the two nightjars began yet another series of most unusual sounds, which almost certainly would have been courtship vocalizations. This series of vocalizations were very different from the display\/advertisement call of the male … I seem to remember “purring sounds” and “gurgling” like noises. I am presuming <\/em>there was a female close by in the darkness, but I do not really know for sure. I do know for certain that the nightjar was unaware of my presence, as I had been holding tight under the cover of a mesquite tree for many minutes, and had entered this position while the bird was calling from the opposite end of his breeding territory some 100 meters away.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Unfortunately, we don’t have recordings of the courtship sounds that Geoff heard in the field that night.\u00a0 But when I was in southern Sonora, I had my own remarkable encounter with a Buff-collared Nightjar, which resulted in another interesting recording.<\/p>\n

It was about 9:00 PM, quite a while after sunset, and my Mexican guide Rene and I were hiking by headlamp down a trail through some scrubby forest on the north slope above Rancho Santa Barbara.\u00a0 We had just stopped to listen (successfully) for Spotted Owls, and I had my recording equipment ready to go, although it was turned off, when Rene came around a corner and a bird flew up in front of him, clucking and growling.\u00a0 I immediately recognized the vocalizations of a nightjar, as I’d heard similar sounds from Common Poorwills and Mexican Whip-poor-wills in distraction displays.\u00a0 I turned my recorder on, and as I did so, the bird flew away from Rene and closer to me — landing about 10 feet in front of me on the path.\u00a0 It took me a couple of seconds to find it in the headlamp and point the microphone at it properly, and during that time it made a bizarre series of quiet sounds, alternating burps and clicks and low gulps.\u00a0 When I finally got a look at the bird in the headlamp, I had just a moment to marvel at how obvious the buff collar really was.\u00a0 For these few seconds (the second half of the recording below), the bird was sitting on the ground without visibly moving, so it definitely was not making any of these sounds by wing-clapping.\u00a0 Then it flew off at the end the way it had flown in, with a couple of gruff clucking calls.<\/p>\nhttp:\/\/earbirding.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2010\/08\/BCNIburpgrowls-NDP2010-05-088.mp3<\/a><\/audio>\n

Over the next week, I tried many times to record more calls from Buff-collared Nightjars, but I had scant luck.\u00a0 However, I did hear these odd burp-clicks again on a number of occasions, from many different individuals — always at the beginning of a song bout.\u00a0 When a male nightjar was about to start singing for an extended period, he would give a series of these burp-clicks for about 10 seconds, which would lead right into the first rendition of his normal song.\u00a0 After that, he would repeat the song for a long time without any calls in between — only the first song in each bout had the special introductory notes.<\/p>\n

Perhaps the most interesting thing about what I recorded is that when I asked Geoff Keller to listen to it, he didn’t seem to think it was a very good match for the presumed courtship sounds he heard in 1986.\u00a0 In other words, the species probably makes even more sounds than can be heard on this page.\u00a0 Geoff’s recording and mine, I think, establish Buff-collared Nightjar as by far the most vocally versatile nightjar in the western United States — but that’s just based on the tiny bit we know of it.\u00a0 What else do Buff-collareds say?<\/p>\n

If ever there was a bird I desperately wanted more recordings of, this is surely it.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I am pleased to share with you a couple of cool recordings that may help resolve (or perhaps merely deepen) the mysteries surrounding the calls of the Buff-collared Nightjar.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[103,4],"tags":[97,98],"class_list":["post-2257","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-behavior","category-id","tag-buff-collared-nightjar","tag-caprimulgus-ridgwayi"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/earbirding.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2257","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/earbirding.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/earbirding.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/earbirding.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/earbirding.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2257"}],"version-history":[{"count":21,"href":"https:\/\/earbirding.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2257\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5056,"href":"https:\/\/earbirding.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2257\/revisions\/5056"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/earbirding.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2257"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/earbirding.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2257"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/earbirding.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2257"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}