Who needs love songs when you can snap your wrists together loudly?
9:05 AM CDT on May 21, 2026
If you’ve ever cracked a birding book, you’ll know it’s filled with onomatopoetic descriptions of bird songs (chirrups, coos, squawks, and so on). What you might not find in those books is the curious noise produced by the South American scissor-tailed nightjar. It’s a soft, snapping noise that’s puzzled ornithologists for some time, but according to new research published in the Journal of Avian Biology, it’s the sound of the nightjar clapping.
Biologist Christopher Clark of the University of California, Riverside and his collaborator Juan Ignacio Areta of Argentina’s national research council CONICET made the discovery after setting up high-speed infrared cameras near a dirt road in Argentina. The footage they captured showed male nightjars performing mating displays in the moonlight, arcing their wings overhead and cracking their wrist bones together. And the clapping wasn’t just limited to courtship displays, the birds also gave themselves a series of (congratulatory?) high-fives during and after copulation.
Read more: “What Pigeons Teach Us About Love”
