The European nightjar is a bird most people have never seen. It arrives in England in May, breeds in silence through the summer, and vanishes south again in September — spending its nights hunting moths on the wing, its body pressed flat against bark or bracken during the day, invisible unless you know exactly what you're looking for.
It is also a bird that was quietly disappearing.
Nightjars depend on open lowland heathland — the kind of habitat that England has lost nearly 85% of since 1800, replaced by agriculture, forestry plantations, and development. As the heathland went, so did the nightjars. By the mid-20th century, they had retreated to a handful of remaining strongholds.
In Sussex's South Downs National Park, those strongholds are fighting back.
A Quiet Comeback
Ecological surveys of South Downs heathland recorded 78 individual nightjars and 109 active territories — the highest figures ever documented in the park. Compared to surveys five years earlier, the population has roughly doubled.
This is not a coincidence. It is the direct result of years of targeted heathland management: removing encroaching trees and scrub that shade out the open, sandy clearings nightjars need for nesting; controlling invasive species; and working with landowners and commoners to maintain the mosaic of habitats the species requires.
Nightjars nest on the ground — their eggs laid directly on bare soil or leaf litter, camouflaged so perfectly that they can be stepped on without being seen. They need clearings for hunting, woodland edges for roosting, and open sky for their churring, nocturnal calls that fill heathland nights in summer. Get the habitat right, and they come back.
What Heathland Does
The same habitat restoration that brought back the nightjars also benefits a wider community of species: Dartford warblers, rare beetles and spiders, reptiles like the smooth snake and sand lizard, and the unique wildflower communities of lowland heath. Heathland is one of the UK's most distinctive and most threatened ecosystems — supporting species found nowhere else in the world at comparable density.
When conservation press releases talk about "habitat restoration," it can sound abstract. The nightjar makes it concrete: here is a bird that was disappearing; here is the habitat it needs; here is what happens when that habitat is restored. The numbers speak plainly.
What's Next
The South Downs National Park Authority continues to work with farmers, landowners, and commoners on heathland management across the chalk downs and coastal plain. The nightjar's recovery offers a template: patient work, careful monitoring, and the knowledge that nature, given enough space, will fill it.
Summer is coming. Somewhere on a Sussex heath, a nightjar is already heading north.
Sources: South Downs National Park · Sussex Wildlife Trust · The Argus, 2023-2024 · Good News Network · BTO (British Trust for Ornithology)
