Common Pauraque

About the Common Pauraque

The Common Pauraque is the nightjar of the South Texas brush country - a bird far more often heard than seen, its burry "pur-WHEER" whistling across the thorn scrub on warm evenings from Falcon to the Gulf. In the U.S. it lives only in deep South Texas, one more Valley specialty on every visiting birder's list.

By day the pauraque simply ceases to exist. It roosts on the ground among leaf litter, and its dead-leaf plumage - grays, browns, and buffs scrawled like bark - makes it invisible from a few feet away. The famous roosting birds at Estero Llano Grande sit beside a busy trail while photographers hunt for minutes before finding them.

At night it comes alive, sitting on open trails and road edges (eyeshine glowing orange in headlights) and sallying up for moths and beetles with a mouth that opens far wider than the little bill suggests.

Longer-tailed and rounder-winged than the nighthawks, the pauraque is a resident, not a migrant - the year-round voice of a South Texas night.