Talk:Standard-winged nightjar

GA Review

The following discussion is closed. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.

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This review is transcluded from Talk:Standard-winged nightjar/GA1. The edit link for this section can be used to add comments to the review.

Nominator: Reconrabbit (talk · contribs) 14:14, 1 November 2024 (UTC)

Reviewer: Chiswick Chap (talk · contribs) 14:30, 3 November 2024 (UTC)

Comments

• Altitudes are normally given in feet, not miles, in Imperial units.

  Units changed.

• To save faffing about I've moved the Commons link away from the reflist, which it was forcing into a single column.

• during the breeding season, wherein males will grow - not sure that "wherein" is the sort of language we should use; how about "during the breeding season; males grow ..." which says all that's needed.

  It was definitely inappropriate for the first paragraph of the article. That's been fixed.

• bizarre and unusual - doubt if these adjectives help readers much, and if the source used them then it might be a close paraphrase anyway. The key point is that the feathers are highly modified for display during sexual selection, being both elongated and reduced to a bare shaft for much of their length; we should say something of that sort, and at the least wikilink sexual selection, given that you mention lekking. It may be necessary to say that sexual selection remains an unconfirmed hypothesis in this species; one paper I saw mentions it as likely; if there is actual evidence then please mention it and cite it.

  "Bizarre and unusual" has been removed; the description was one of the sections that had slightly more work done on it prior to 2024 and that was held over. The 2010 phylogenetic study by Han et al. ascribes the ornamental wings of the pennant-winged and standard-winged nightjar as a feature that "may have evolved rapidly under intense sexual selection". A note is added to the Description heading.

• The other point about the feathers is that many birds have flight feathers modified to produce sound; only this and one other nightjar (C. vexillarius), and the great argus pheasant, have flight feathers modified for visual effect. This must be worth saying and citing. In this sense the modification is indeed clearly "unusual", indeed rare among bird species.

• the which has been linked to birds being impacted by cars - perhaps " a behaviour which has been linked to bird strike by cars"

  Change has been made.

• due to their ability to survive with such a burden - hmm. This is an oblique reference to Zahavi's handicap principle which is now largely discredited by zoologists. I suggest we qualify this by a) naming Zahavi and the principle, b) noting that this is one possible explanation, and c) using a source from that article, noting also that the explanation is now considered doubtful at best on theoretical grounds. The ref [4] Lovette here may be fine as ornithology but it could well be a bit dated as evolutionary biology. For instance handicap principle's ref [39] Penn 2019 is more recent and pretty critical of the theory, and that article's ref [38] Huttegger 2015 is a little older and no more favourable.

  Lovette provides the example of the nightjar as a brief note under the initial heading of sexual selection, and goes on to describe the handicap principle later without noting any direct evidence against it. The book is where I take a lot of my ornithology knowledge from but it doesn't go into this as in depth as may have been hoped. I've commented out the note for now since it doesn't add very much with the added statement earlier under "Description" that notes sexual selection as written about by Han et al.

OK, thanks for the replies and fixes. I hope you've found the review helpful and are pleased with the result. If you'd care to review one of my Biology articles it'd be much appreciated. Chiswick Chap (talk) 12:43, 4 November 2024 (UTC)

Images

• Images are all on Commons and plausibly licensed. Shame the night-flying one didn't use a flash!

  It's unfortunate. All the photos I could find with applicable licenses just show the birds at rest on the ground. There are a few videos out there but all are copyrighted.

Sources

• Refs [1], [6], [7] check out.

• Ref [9] does not seem to support the claim made in the sentence in which it occurs (rather the reverse), though given the ref's bizarre placement it's not clear if it's supporting anything very much.

  I was working off incomplete information when I was figuring out where to place that. Should be better now.

• I've tagged [11] IUCN Status as empty, the citation has no content.

  Something happened when I tried copying over the wikitext in visual editor, it's now corrected to match the citation used in the infobox (migratory birds indicated by "full migrant", status).

Summary

This article is very close to GA level and just needs the few items above to be attended to first. Chiswick Chap (talk) 16:06, 3 November 2024 (UTC)

The discussion above is closed. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.

Did you know nomination

(

• Comment or view
• Article history

)

Standard-winged nightjar

• ... that during breeding season, the male standard-winged nightjar (pictured) grows a wing ornament over twice the length of its body?

• Source: Cleere, N.; Kirwan, G. M. (2020). del Hoyo, J.; Elliott, A.; Sargatal, J.; Christie, D. A.; de Juana, E. (eds.). "Standard-winged Nightjar (Caprimulgus longipennis), version 1.0". Birds of the World Online. Cornell Lab of Ornithology, Ithaca, NY. doi:10.2173/bow.stwnig1.01. 21–22 cm (excluding male's "standards", which reach 45–53·5 cm in length)

• Reviewed: Template:Did you know nominations/Harvey Tuckett

Improved to Good Article status by Reconrabbit (talk). Number of QPQs required: 1. Nominator has 6 past nominations.

Reconrabbit 22:33, 4 November 2024 (UTC).

• The article is fine in every respect (long enough, well-written and recently enough promoted to GA), and the hook is good, but it is not backed up by the wording in the article. In the article it simply says that the standards are "much longer" than the body, now "twice the length". There should also be an inline citation supporting the claim directly after the sentence in which it is made. It's a small fix, after which the article should be ready for DYK. Yakikaki (talk) 22:31, 6 November 2024 (UTC)

  I believe that the length given of a broad secondary flight feather[4] on each wing elongated to up to 53.5 centimetres makes sense to describe as "twice the length of its body" since earlier the bird's length is given as this medium-sized (20–23 centimetres (7.9–9.1 in) long) nightjar and 53.5÷2=26.75 > 23 cm. Though since it's "up to" I could see justifying adding "that can be" after "wing ornament" in the hook. Additionally the quote in the source describes the bird's body as "21-22 cm" and immediately after gives a minimum length of 45 cm with the standards. I could change it to say directly in the article "over twice the length" instead of just "much longer" though. Reconrabbit 00:10, 7 November 2024 (UTC)

Sure, I wasn't arguing that the facts were not in the article or not supported by the inline citations. DYK used to have a rule, though, which stated "The facts of the hook need to appear in the article with a citation no later than at the end of the sentences in which they appear." However I see now that the rules have changed and become more flexible, and I can therefore happily drop this minor objection and give the green light to the article. Nice work! Yakikaki (talk) 15:51, 7 November 2024 (UTC)