Just before stepping up onto the ledge of a flat outcrop she appeared suddenly from the grasses, nearly flat against the rough and gnarled granite, her beak wide with eyes speaking of the wild. She appeared to hiss at me, although in reality it was more of an anguished squawk. 

Her message was clear, both eloquent and forceful enough to convince us to skirt around the granite outcrop away from her perhaps quite well camouflaged chicks. She was quite adept in her role as a guardian of her small brood.

While nighthawks fly with uncommon grace, and dive from great heights with blinding speed, on the ground their short legs and horizontal stance makes them almost immobile. The Cornell Lab of Ornithology notes that nighthawks won’t make a nest and their young are so well camouflaged that they’re nearly impossible to find, and even the adults seem to vanish as soon as they land.

Not this one, for she was a guardian with a goal of protecting her young, and if the experts at Cornell and Audubon are correct, we might not have seen her chicks even if we’d stepped onto the outcrop. In all honestly, this was the first nighthawk I’ve ever seen on the ground. 

Researchers have noted that with the overwhelming takeover of grassy lands for commodity crops that much of the former territory of the nighthawks has been destroyed. Nowadays they use areas like the outcrops at Big Stone National Wildlife Refuge (NWR) as nesting sites. So she was an unexpected and welcomed bonus.

We had come to the outcrops in hopes of photographing blooms of the second of two cacti located in the Refuge … brittle prickly pear. Earlier we were incredibly fortunate to capture the blooms of the extremely rare ball cactus, and now the blooms of the brittle. Thankfully they were blooming on the adjacent flat outcrops so we were able to photograph several clumps of the beautiful pale yellowish flowers without disturbing the protective nighthawk.

This female nighthawk wasn’t the only guardian of newly welcomed hatched birds of the early summer. Due to our wandering through three different NRW’s in the past week we’ve noticed many different species doing the same, from raptors like bald eagles and ospreys to swans and ducks, pheasants and even sandhill cranes. What a joy to observe such protective care and parenting in nature. And now is a perfect time to be out and about to observe and capture images of all the different species in parenthood.

Not far from the nighthawk, for example, is a huge eagles nest, and the bulky “baby’ seems nearly as large as its nearby, perched parent. We caught both on the nest tree. We also were fortunate to capture an osprey on her nest at Tamarac NWR a couple of days later with three young ones she was protecting in the nest. Thankfully one continued to poke his head above the contour of the edge of the stick-heavy nest. 

While I haven’t had much luck in catching a brood of pheasants, for they’re quite good at sneaking into the roadside grasses before I can focus, watching the swans with their cygnets both at Tamarac and Sherburne NWR, along with some in a nearby wetland, has been a rewarding experience. Unlike the nighthawks, swans, like the sandhill cranes, have made a resurgence in numbers and are no longer consider rare. Same with bald eagles. 

At Sherburne we witnessed sandhill colts in lockstep with their parents, easing through the prairie grasses near the wetlands pecking for edibles. We weren’t considered a threat, it seemed, as they leisurely meandered along. Two parents and the colt.

Twice we’ve been stopped on the road by mallard hens as their tiny ducklings waddled slowly behind them across the gravel toward a nearby wetland. And twice I’ve captured wood duck hens with their brood cruising though the shallows of wetlands. So peaceful. So beautiful

Oh, and the swans! There isn’t a way to overlook or ignore the artistic beauty of swans, and when they’re with their cygnets the beauty is in the protective parenting more so  than the arts. Both at Sherburne and Tamarac, male and female couples hung close to their growing brood, easing through the waters with apparent ease, or resting quietly among the cattails and reeds.

Yes, this has been a wonderful start to the summer watching the recently hatched birds of various species as they move from cracked shells through their quick learning path. Most of these avian guardians are common to us. But the nighthawk? What a wonderful surprise and photographic capture. In a world of devastation due to wars and climate change, watching nature evolve in peace and parental care has been an incredible and welcomed diversion; that the world of nature marches ever onward despite the ills of humanity.