[Douglbirds] Common Poorwill

[Hugh Kingery]

    Over on the Castlewood side of Castle Rock, we hear poorwills every night. They prefer, I think the rougher country, maybe with quite a bit of cover. Listen for them at dusk and dawn -- that's when they make that odd call. Once in a long while (once, that is) I saw one calling as it flew around the house. 

    Then just to rub it in, Urling and I picked an Atlas block north of Limon that has a ridge crossing it, the north slope of the ridge covered with junipers. Tuesday Bill Eden and I went out there and -- wow! -- we flushed a poorwill off its "nest." The nest consists of a relatively level place where the bird lays two eggs. 

    I atlasing we sometimes use the principle, "The birds can't count." Bill hunkered down under some nearby juniper branches and I walked away, trying to find some other atlas observation of significance (I didn't). After 25 minutes he called on our walkie talkie to say that the bird had returned, cautionsly, and come to sit on the eggs. He got a picture of this cryptic character on the nest.

    A description of the site gives you an idea of the kind of site this one picked for nesting. It's a gently sloping bare patch of ground, maybe 10 feet in diameter, under a spreading juniper. A bunch of ticks but no vegetation. The bird plopped the eggs on the ground -- no nest -- in the middle of this bare piece of ground, but which seemed relatively sheltered. (Urling found anighthawk nest this week plunked in the middle of bare ground, in a grassland.)

        Hugh Kingery
Franktown, Colorado
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