Rewind to chickhood... In this clip, the nightjar chicks are almost exactly a week old. Here they take turns to go to the loo, sticking to a rigid procedure of stretch, emerge, discharge, solicit.
First, at 0:08 the chick nestled under the mother's right wing extends its own wing from beneath the parent. The chick then sticks its head out before fully emerging in front of mom. The chick rocks for a few seconds, turns around, climbs backwards onto the branch lying to mom's right and evacuates its bowels. Next, it takes a couple of steps and tries to grab mom's beak in an attempt to solicit food - to no avail (perhaps obviously as the local time is 21:49). As soon as the chick has crawled back underneath the parent (0:38), its sibling initiates the same routine of its own. There are just a couple of differences in the execution: an additional bit of wing-stretching after the chick has crawled back underneath mom and its brief re-emergence during which the chick seems to conduct a "visual inspection" of the sibling's dropping. The loo visits are well and truly over at 1:30.
Unfortunately, my video editor seems to have played an unwelcome trick, speeding up the three-second sequence in which the second chick deposits its dropping and runs back to grasp mom's beak. This resultant slapstick effect distorts the reality a tiny bit.
You might be interested to compare this video to the clip made available at by aita3331.
Note: This video was extracted from a file stored in the 2019-öösorr/ live webcam video archive maintained by Looduskalender.ee. To find out more about the activities of Looduskalender.ee, go to or
0 Comments