Introduction

A Fiery-necked Nightjar brooding two chicks among leaf litter in Zambia.

Nesting nightjars (and other ground-nesting birds such as plovers and coursers) are a particularly neat system for studying the evolution of camouflage in the wild: they don’t build any kind of nest structure but just lay their eggs directly on the natural background, which means they depend completely on the appearance of their eggs or their own bodies for concealment. It’s also important that nests by definition are in a fixed location – so you know the bird has chosen that spot rather than happening to have landed there after being disturbed. At our study site in Zambia we have several species of nightjar, plover and courser breed out in the open in the baking heat of the late dry season. They need to make sure that their eggs (and themselves) are protected not only from predators but also dangerously high temperatures out in the sun at midday.

Jolyon Troscianko and Jared Wilson-Aggarwal in the field in Zambia, photographing an incubating Fiery-necked Nightjar using a UV-sensitive camera.

We’ve been studying nightjars, coursers and plovers in the field in Zambia since 2011. These birds are currently the focus of Dr Nick Horrocks‘s work on thermal ecology. They were previously the focus of a BBSRC-funded research project in collaboration with the Sensory Ecology Group Exeter University, co-led by Exeter’s Dr Martin Stevens and carried out by Dr Jolyon Troscianko and Jared Wilson-Aggarwal. Please read more about our work on the ProjectNightjar website, help us with our research by posing as a predator in an online computer game and exerting some natural selection on ever-evolving populations of virtual eggs, have a look at the photo galleries below of real nightjars and coursers in the field, and join nearly half a million others in watching this very short video that our funders, the BBSRC, made using our film footage from Zambia: