The great eared nightjar (Lyncornis macrotis) is a nocturnal bird found from southwestern India across much of Southeast Asia, and the first thing anyone notices about it is the pair of horn-like points rising off its head.

They are not ears, and they are not horns. They are tufts of feathers, called ear-tufts only because of where they sit, not because they have anything to do with hearing. Owls have the same thing. The bird's actual ear openings are hidden under feathers on the head, as in every other bird.

Much of the time those tufts lie flat and are barely visible. When the bird sits upright and raises them, staring forward with enormous black eyes, they stand straight up on either side of the head.

The scientists who named it saw a different animal. The genus name Lyncornis combines the Greek words for "lynx" and "bird," and the species name macrotis means "long-eared." A long-eared lynx-bird. The Irish zoologist Nicholas Aylward Vigors formally described it in 1831 from a specimen collected near Manila, and the cat comparison has been in its name ever since.

For size, it is the longest member of the nightjar family, measuring 31 to 41 centimeters (12 to 16 inches) from bill to tail tip, with a wingspan of roughly 70 centimeters (about 28 inches). Males average around 131 grams (4.6 ounces) and females around 151 grams (5.3 ounces), less than a typical apple. Almost all of its bulk is feather and wing.

The plumage is a mottled scramble of brown, gray, and black, with fine barring across the wings and tail and a thin white band at the throat.

Biologists call this cryptic coloration, meaning coloring whose entire purpose is to make an animal hard to detect rather than to signal or attract. The great eared nightjar spends daylight hours resting on the forest floor or lengthwise along a branch, completely motionless, and the pattern dissolves into leaf litter and bark. When threatened, its first move is not to fly. It flattens, narrows its eyes to slits, and holds completely still, relying entirely on not being seen.

This works so well that experienced birdwatchers regularly walk within a few steps of a resting nightjar without noticing it.

A nightjar's tiny, dark bill hides an enormous mouth. When one opens up, it extends back past the eyes into a wide funnel. The bird does not catch insects so much as fly through them with its face open.

Fringing the edges are rictal bristles, stiff whisker-like feathers growing from the base of the beak. Researchers think they serve a double purpose: helping funnel prey inward, and giving the bird tactile feedback about what it is intercepting in the dark, the way a cat's whiskers do.

The hunting happens at dusk and through the night, when the bird takes to the air after moths, beetles, flies, and other flying insects. Two more adaptations make this possible.

The first is the eyes. They are proportionally huge and packed with rod cells, the light-sensitive cells that handle vision in dim conditions. Behind the retina sits a tapetum lucidum, a reflective layer that bounces incoming light back through the eye a second time, giving the retina two chances at every photon. It is the same structure that makes a cat's eyes glow in headlights, and it is why a torch beam swept across a forest at night will sometimes catch a pair of small floating embers looking back.

The second is the flight. Nightjar wing feathers have soft, fringed leading edges that break up the turbulence a wingbeat normally creates. The result is flight that is close to silent and unusually buoyant, more moth than bird. It lets them close on prey without giving themselves away, and it keeps them quiet in a forest full of things that would happily eat a 150-gram (5-ounce) bird.

The great eared nightjar does not build a nest. There is no cup, no structure, no gathered material. The female lays a single egg into a simple scrape on the forest floor, a shallow dip in the leaf litter, and that is the entire arrangement.

It sounds reckless. It is actually consistent with everything else this bird does. A nest is a structure, and structures are visible. They announce to every snake, monitor lizard, and small mammal in the area that something worth eating is sitting at that exact spot. By skipping the nest, the nightjar removes the signal.

What protects the egg instead is the same thing that protects the adult: it looks like nothing. The egg is mottled and blends into the ground. The incubating parent sits over it, camouflaged and motionless, and both parents share the work. When the chick hatches, it is already patterned to vanish into the forest floor, and it stays perfectly still.

The call of the great eared nightjar carries a long way through the forest at dusk. It starts with a sharp, high note, pauses, then delivers a rising two-part cry usually written as something like "ba-haaww" or "bee-AHWEE."

The great eared nightjar occupies tropical and subtropical lowland forest, forest edges, and open country with scattered tree cover, across a range stretching from southwestern India, Sri Lanka, and Bangladesh through Myanmar, Thailand, Laos, Vietnam, southern China, Malaysia, Indonesia, and the Philippines. Five subspecies are currently recognized across that spread, differing slightly in size and coloring by region.