Gray Nightjar

About the Gray Nightjar

The grey nightjar (Caprimulgus jotaka; also "gray" in some non-local literature) is a species of nightjar found in East Asia, breeding from southeastern Russia south through China, the Korean Peninsula and Japan to northern Indochina and westward along the Himalayas. It is largely migratory, wintering in Indochina south to Java in Indonesia, but is resident in warmer areas in the south of its breeding range. It is sometimes treated as a subspecies of the jungle nightjar (C. indicus), its South Asian relative. The grey nightjar breeds and forages in early successional habitats surrounded by forests; its populations have declined since the 1970s in Japan. Like all nightjars, it is crepuscular to nocturnal, feeding on flying insects, including moths, beetles, flying ants, grasshoppers, and others.

The species was formally described in 1845 by Coenraad Jacob Temminck and Hermann Schlegel with the binomial name Caprimulgus jotaka based on specimens collected in Japan. The specific epithet is the Japanese word for the species, Yo taka meaning "night hawk". The grey nightjar was subsequently included as a subspecies of the jungle nightjar (C. indicus; also called grey nightjar... Wikipedia →