The Common Pauraque’s subtle brown, black, and gray plumage provides such excellent camouflage that it might as well be invisible in its daytime sleeping spots on open ground. From dusk till dawn, the male’s songs are anything but quiet, ranging from rising whistles to grunts that sound like frogs. It is skilled at catching flying insects and like all nightjars has a gaping wide mouth behind a tiny bill. Widespread in the Neotropics, the Common Pauraque ventures into the U.S. just at the southernmost tip of Texas.
In the evening, we observed Common Pauraque at almost every stop on our trip.
It was really cool to observe them hunting insects and returning to the same spot. This one was lit up by lights from an old tractor shed and I watched for quite awhile as it would fly upward and catch insects heading toward the lights.
As is true of nightjars around the world, the Common Pauraque is the subject of many folk beliefs, among them that the male’s song identifies the presence of “Don Pucuyo,” a roving, romantic spirit.
The Common Pauraque lays two attractive eggs, buffy or salmon-buff in color, marked with reddish brown, cinnamon, gray, and lavender—quite distinct from the eggs of any other nightjar species. Cornell All About Birds
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