The best story I know showing how difficult it is to find nightjars on their nests is one told by the ornithologist John Walpole-Bond. He once came upon a nightjar's tail feathers all arrayed in the exact spot where they'd been "plucked" by the foot (or hoof) of some unwitting pedestrian. It says much about a nightjar's camouflage but also about the extraordinary tenacity of these birds.
Our nightjar was a few metres away, but she betrayed no anxiety except to keep her pale lids fractionally open so that we could see a third of her liquid dark eyes. We could observe every detail in her plumage: the six creamy spots down her grey-marbled shoulders, the rosette of black-edged throat feathers and the strangely thin beak with its protruding nostrils, and then those remarkable whiskers around the mouth sides that help guide her insect prey (beetles, moths etc) into that vast pink maw as she feeds on the wing.
Throughout our visit she never moved. She was, in a sense, what she seemed: a dead log embedded in dead bracken. Yet this bird was both profoundly alive and deeply moving. Our moments with her felt like an act of worship at an ancient shrine.
There is a glorious passage by Henry Thoreau of his encounter with a nightjar relative called a nighthawk. Despite writing on 7 June 1853, Thoreau divined how long these birds have truly been on earth. He talked of her being like a "bronze sphinx" and "a relic of the reign of Saturn".
Writing before any of us had worked out that life has been unfolding for 3.5bn years, Thoreau sensed that his bird pre-dated humans and even their gods. Proto-nightjars have been discovered in deposits that are 40m years old. Somehow all of that nightjar inheritance was there before us in her all-seeing, stone-like quiescence.
Source: http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2011/jun/27/country-diary-holt-norfolk-nightjar
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