Finders-in-the-Field: Common Nighthawk, Bushy Park, London
I am a plumbing and heating engineer from Surrey but part time wildlife photographer who visits Bushy Park and Richmond Park a few times a week, however this time was different. I decided to do my morning sunrise shoot and was out to try and locate a Little Owl which I saw the previous week. Being so used to the familiar sightings I knew that when I first spotted this figure in the sky it was something special the way it was flying and its presence was something I had not seen before!
It was 12.29 on the 19/10/19 I was at the Diana fountain in Bushy Park,London when I noticed something very high in the sky circling appearing from the Thames side. All day I had not had much luck with my findings, a brief moment with a kingfisher however my luck soon changed, I spotted an unusual figure in the sky, I extended my camera lens to 600mm in order to get anywhere close to the bird. I noticed distinct white markings. I managed to capture a few decent images before the bird continued to circle making off in a north east direction towards Richmond. I tried to keep up however it soon disappeared. I spent roughly 10 minutes with the bird before I lost contact. The conditions made it quite hard to capture the bird as the sunlight was extremely harsh being the middle of the day.
After further investigation on my photos I realised the bird I had in fact been capturing was a Common Nighthawk.
I immediately put this information on social media to which my account exploded and still is to this point. Being contacted by many people from birders to other wildlife photographers to people who are just generally interested in this sighting. Everyone is absolutely shocked. So far the bird has not been relocated although there has since been a report from Richmond Park at 2:30pm which is the direction I saw the bird heading in so hopefully it is still out there for others to find and see.
Lewis Newman
20 October 2019
From RBA
Having broken news on some of the most outrageous rarities over the last 28 years we know we are never more than a phone call (or a tweet) away from the next jaw dropping moment. Even so, when news came to us of the Common Nighthawk in Bushy Park we, like most birders, were pretty shocked, It quickly became apparent that Lewis’s Bushy Park bird was the same individual recently present near Ballymena in Northern Ireland,. The Ballymena bird was last reported by us in the evening of Thursday 17th Oct where it was still present at 6:55pm. The exif data on Lewis’s photos record that he first started photographing the Bushy park bird at 12:29 on Saturday 19th October – a quite remarkable relocation.
The same birds?
The photos from Northern Ireland and London show the bird with dishevelled central tail feathers and a damaged tip to the outermost tail feather on the right side. Also the distribution of dark and white on the sixth primaries is asymmetrical. All of which proves the bird is one and the same!
Previous Records
There is one previous record of Common Nighthawk in London, a bird found exhausted at Barnes Common on October 23rd 1984. It was taken into care but died five days later. There are currently 22 accepted records for Britain and two for Ireland. Scilly holds bulk of the records with 14 with singles in Cornwall, Dorset, Ceredigion, Cheshire, Nottinghamshire, Co.Durham and Orkney.
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