Common Nighthawk

About the Common Nighthawk

The Common Nighthawk is the bird behind that buzzy "peent" call overhead on warm Texas evenings - a slim, long-winged shape sweeping and swooping high over towns, ballfields, and lakeshores at dusk. In good light the bold white slash across each pointed wing gives it away instantly.

Nighthawks are aerial insect-eaters, trawling the sky with their tiny bill hiding an enormous gaping mouth. A single bird can put away hundreds of flying insects in an evening, which makes the species a welcome summer neighbor anywhere the porch lights draw bugs. By day they vanish, sitting lengthwise along a branch or flat on gravel where their mottled gray-brown plumage looks exactly like bark or stone.

Displaying males add one of the strangest sounds in Texas birding: at the bottom of a steep dive, air rushing through the wing feathers produces a hollow booming "voom." They nest on bare ground and flat gravel rooftops, asking nothing but open sky.

Late summer is the spectacle, when migrating nighthawks gather into loose flocks that stream south by the dozens or hundreds - one of the signs that fall is coming to Texas, even when the thermometer disagrees.