Amazing, well done!

Just don’t open yer mouth!

Excellent, do pass my thanks on to James and I look forward to receiving your feathers.

Hi Angus. I’ve received a parcel of PM feathers. I will add them to the next batch I send to Sweden. Mìle taing!

I’ll take as many as you can give me. Genetic material from feathers is often low quality, so it held to have a larger sample.

Hi Angus, I’d be delighted to receive any feathers from your surveys (I think the RSPB surveys are a bit different to ours). Could you just pop them in marked packets with location and time, and then send to BTO Scotland in Stirling? Mòran taing!

If you're involved with fieldwork in any way, you may want to check out these resources we made last year for LGBTQ+ inclusive fieldwork (even if you don't think any LGBTQ+ people are involved!) inclusivefieldwork.leeds.ac.uk/pride/

If you’d like to read the short note that we published in Malimbus on the chicks of this species, get in touch and I can send you a copy.

One of mr wonderful colleagues at APLORI, Dickson Matthew, who is a brilliant birder adding so much to West African ornithology, continued to monitor the chicks after I returned to Scotland, and the final photo from him shows one of them just about fledged (and a bit soggy from the rain)

An interesting thing was that when I found them, the female nightjar was incubating and flushed a short distance away, but both chicks had ants all over them! At first I thought they were attacking them but they seemed totally fine with it. They must’ve been all over the adult as well 🐜

Over the course of 2 weeks I watched mama nightjar return to the nest and incubate her eggs. On my very last day in Nigeria (an hour or so before I was due to get a lift back to Abuja!) I’d found the eggs had hatched and the chickies, even though they were blind, had wandered a short distance away

We came across the nest (like most nightjars just a shallow scrape in the soil) while setting up mist nets to catch and tag African Thrush. To prevent us inadvertently stepping on the well-camouflaged eggs, we put a marker branch nearby and moved elsewhere to catch thrushes