Sunday lunchtime arrived, and I was talking with Kevin Heath (@kev07713) about the previous day's birding. He then suggested that he and his wife Karen (@karenheath62) had been discussing making a trip down into Berkshire that evening to see if they could see some woodcock and nightjars - what a splendid idea! I was invited to join them. And so, after an afternoon of visiting garden centres and planting up, we met in the evening to make the journey of about an hour. With Kev's car in the garage having some work done on it, I offered to drive, and we were there in about an hour.
We found our car park and made our way down a woodland track, eventually finding the area we thought would be most productive for nightjars and settled in. We were entertained by a pair of great spotted woodpeckers who were nesting in a very visible tree and came in and out regularly.
At 9.00pm we had our first flyover by a woodcock, and I started trying out settings to give some relief against the sky - we watched as every few minutes another appeared. Within ten minutes we started to hear some ‘churring’ on the far tree line and by 9.15pm we had seen a flight from a nightjar - very early! We watched as one nightjar became two and there was some chasing around the clearing we were standing in. I followed one of the birds and saw it land in a tree out in front where it continued to 'churr'. I pointed out the position to Kev and Karen.
We had a few more flight views but much of the time the birds were perched in trees and 'churring', even getting much closer in the trees behind us. We then spent the next half an hour listening to and watching woodcock (over a dozen) over and the nightjars relocate.
Kev picked out a tree in which one of the nightjars was calling from and so I eventually positioned myself there and waited in hope that it would return before it was too dark. At 9.50pm a nightjar dropped onto the stick and started to ‘churr’ - I took a few photos and this didn't seem to disturb the bird - I managed to make a few changed to the camera setting in the hope that I'd be able to extract something from one of them. I had limited to ISO12,800 and was shooting at f5.6 with a shutter speed of around ⅙s and would need to be steady - I shot in bursts of two or three with the shutter sounding very sluggish.
After a minute or two the bird took to the wing and left - the light had left too, and I snapped a photo of the moon to capture the environment and mood. We were elated by the fantastic evening we'd shared and picked our way back to the car, trying not to trip over any tree roots across the path. Kev heard a car door close and sped ahead to check it wasn't someone at my car, but finding another car at the end of the car park - we didn't stop to find out any more! We jumped into the car and basked in the glow of a successful trip. One of the photos of the nightjars would turn out better than in my wildest dreams, and I also managed to extract something from the woodcocks too.
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