How difficult is it to find a roosting Nightjar?

["Philip Veerman" <>]

Hi All,

 

This is just as relevant here as it is in Africa, where this link came from (an email to ). Here is a fun little game of finding a Nightjar. It takes just a few minutes. It is designed to test our perception and study camouflage and see how good we are at finding a roosting Nightjar. So the results are compiled and compared according to observer age group. It gives you 20 photos of a Nightjar roosting on the ground and you need to click the mouse on it when you can see it. It gives a give up option for each. It first asks if you want to be a monkey or a mongoose. After each photo it goes to the next. At the end it gives a score of your average time (presumably out of the 20). I don't know what happens with your score if you don't find it or you click the mouse but not on the Nightjar. I don't see if that was explained. My average score on my first time was 6.19 seconds, which is not a winning score but then again I think if you do it many times you would get better at it but then it is partly remembering, rather than finding it. Maybe the winning scores would be from those who have done it many times (which I suspect would defeat the purpose of the exercise). Hopefully the researchers have built something into their methods that take this issue into account.

 

For those who don't like Nightjars, maybe you can imagine it is a Night Parrot.

 

Philip

 

-----Original Message-----From: [ On Behalf Of Keith Betton
Sent: Thursday, 22 August 2013 8:45 AM      To:       Subject: [AfricanBirding] How difficult is it to find a roosting Nightjar?

See how good you are at finding a Nightjar using this test:

http://nightjar.exeter.ac.uk/where-is-that-nightjar/

My fastest average so far is 1.7 seconds, but I have had 5 goes at it!

Regards

Keith