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Josesito Perez showed me this roosting Lesser Nighthawk in the town of Gamboa, on the eastern edge
of the Panama Canal, in September of 2006. I collected a few seconds of fair-to-middling video- it's not particularly
easy to differentiate the bird in the still below from Common Nighthawk (although Common tends to be more of a foothills
species in Panama). A couple of clues are a somewhat less-coarse barring on the underparts of the Lesser Nighthawk, and a more uniformly
gray upperside. Even gray-phase Common Nighthawks tend to show some rufous coloration and contrasting dark patches on the wing. I was delighted
to see a couple of Lesser Nighthawks later the same day, hawking insects at dusk near the Canopy Tower. These
were my first Lesser Nighthawks for Panama.
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