This summer, two dozen citizen scientists will be heading out before dusk to scan the skies above landmarks of Oak Park and River Forest. Their objective is to look and listen for a bird that some may be familiar with, but others may not: the Common Nighthawk.
This fascinating but poorly understood animal spends its summers with us after migrating from as far away as the Amazon basin. Historically, it has been most at home in open fields and prairies across North America. With the loss of such habitat, however, the Nighthawk has increasingly made its home in urban areas, nesting on gravel rooftops instead of in open countryside, and foraging for insects above the bright evening lights of parks and commercial buildings.
Despite this striking adaptability, the Common Nighthawk is one of the fastest-declining birds in North America, falling in numbers by 60% over the last 50 years. In the Chicago region, this federally-protected bird is considered by the Bird Conservation Network to be a species needing “priority attention and management.” Yet we can’t devote attention to the management of Nighthawks if we don’t know where they chose to hatch their chicks.
The research – and personal observations – suggest that Nighthawks make use of big, flat-roofed buildings for their nests: big-box stores, school gymnasia, or any building with a substantial gravel roof. To accommodate the Nighthawk, then, we will need more than habitat protected by forest preserves. We will need a conservation paradigm that treats buildings, rooftops in particular, as potential habitat, in the same way that a butterfly garden in a private yard provides habitat for pollinators, or a Chicago skyscraper offers a niche for the Peregrine falcon.
The two dozen volunteers for this survey may not yet all know each other, but together they will give us a better picture of an avian neighbor, so that it may continue to summer here as it has for thousands of years.
David Hoyt
River Forest