Owlet-nightjar
order of birds
Owlet-nightjars are small crepuscular birds related to the nightjars and frogmouths. Most are native to New Guinea, but some species extend to Australia, the Moluccas, and New Caledonia. A flightless species from New Zealand is extinct. There is a single monotypic family Aegothelidae with the genus Aegotheles.
Owlet-nightjars are insectivores which hunt mostly in the air but sometimes on the ground; their soft plumage is a cryptic mixture of browns and paler shades, they have fairly small, weak feet (but larger and stronger than those of a frogmouth or a nightjar), a tiny bill that opens extraordinarily wide, surrounded by prominent whiskers. The wings are short, with 10 primaries and about 11 secondaries; the tail long and rounded.
Taxonomy
The genus Aegotheles was introduced in 1827 by the naturalists Nicholas Vigors and Thomas Horsfield to accommodate a single species, Caprimulgus novaehollandiae Latham, 1790. This binomial name is considered to be a junior synonym of Caprimulgus cristatus, the Australian owlet-nightjar that was introduced by George Shaw earlier in 1790. The genus name means "nightjar" or "goatsucker" from Ancient Greek αιξ/aix, αιγος/aigos meaning "goat" and θηλαζω/thēlazō meaning "to suckle". The family Aegothelidae was introduced (as subfamily Aegothelinae within the family Caprimulgidae) in 1853 by the French naturalist Charles Lucien Bonaparte.
“Owlet-nightjar” enters the record as order of birds. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Owlet-nightjar, order and birds can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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This entry incorporates text from “Owlet-nightjar” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.