---
title: "Pennant-winged nightjar males grow wing streamers up to twice their body length, then drop them"
url: https://badiyaa.com/pennant-winged-nightjar-wing-streamers/
published: 2026-11-11T04:00:00+00:00
modified: 2026-11-11T04:00:00+00:00
section: Pets & Animals
publisher: Badiyaa
---

# Pennant-winged nightjar males grow wing streamers up to twice their body length, then drop them

Male pennant-winged nightjars in Africa grow wing pennants up to twice their body length for breeding season, then shed them before flying north.

For a few months each southern summer, the male pennant-winged nightjar flies around with two feathers that can grow to twice the length of its own body. When breeding ends, it simply lets them go.

The bird, *Caprimulgus vexillarius*, lives from Nigeria down to the northern fringe of South Africa and migrates without ever leaving the continent. Its breeding males are among the most dramatically dressed birds in African woodland, according to the [species account](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pennant-winged_nightjar).

## What the pennants are

Each pennant is a single flight feather, the second primary on each wing, grown far past its usual size. Most nightjars keep that feather short. A breeding male’s pair gets longer every year he survives, topping out at up to double his body length. Once the season is over, the streamers are shed or snap off within a short time.

The males carry other markings too: a broad white band across otherwise black primaries, and an angular wing outline, because the outermost and innermost primaries are the longest. Females have no streamers and look like a standard mottled nightjar, built to vanish against leaf litter.

## A bird timed to the moon

Pennant-winged nightjars feed in the half-light. They come out in late afternoon or just after sunset, hunt again before sunrise, and eat a range of insects, with scarab beetles a clear favorite. They drink on the wing, gliding low and slow over open water.

South of the equator they breed from spring into early summer, mostly in plateau woodland such as miombo, and they like slopes littered with stones and boulders. Each male keeps his own display patch and calls passing females with a thin song that sounds more like an insect than a bird. His display flights can weave low between the trees or climb high overhead, and a receptive female may join him in the air.

The eggs go straight onto bare ground, with no nest built, and laying lines up with the full moon. Put those pieces together and the calendar is tidy: a male grows his pennants for spring, shows them off on bright moonlit nights, then drops them before the long trip north. By midsummer some birds are already heading back to spend the off-season in savanna between Nigeria and Sudan.

## Why a good night photo is rare

Getting a sharp picture of any nightjar after dark is hard work. Ally Ross, a ranger at Sabi Sabi, a private reserve beside Kruger National Park in South Africa, wrote in a lodge blog that the reserve records six nightjar species, the pennant-winged among them. He said the birds’ bark-and-leaf coloring hides them so well that they are difficult to find unless they settle on a warm dirt road.

Ross described taking a guest out on his belly toward a bird on the track while his tracker held a flashlight on it. “Then just like two-inch worms, we slowly moved closer toward the Nightjar sitting in the middle of the road,” he wrote, adding that the pair braced their cameras on piles of elephant dung.

The same post notes that nightjars have very large eyes packed with light-sensitive rod cells, which is what lets them hunt in near darkness, and that ground roosting leaves their eggs exposed wherever vehicles pass.

Other birds have evolved their own odd tricks. Frigatebirds [sleep with half their brain at a time on ocean flights](https://badiyaa.com/frigatebird-half-brain-sleep-study/), and in the Kalahari, [sociable weavers share one giant nest among 100 pairs](https://badiyaa.com/sociable-weaver-nest-bird-architects/). For another small night bird that relies on camouflage, see how [saw-whet owls migrate across North America](https://badiyaa.com/northern-saw-whet-owl-toot-call-migration/).

The species is listed as Least Concern by the IUCN, and in southern Africa the males are in full plumage now: the breeding season runs from spring into early summer, which there means September to December.

## Further reading

- [Wikipedia: Pennant-winged nightjar](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pennant-winged_nightjar)

*Image: Nigel Voaden, CC BY-SA 2.0 via Wikimedia Commons*

*This article was produced with AI assistance and reviewed by our Editorial Desk. [How we work](https://badiyaa.com/editorial-policy/).*