Suburban backyard night birding

[Harrier]

My daughter requested that we sleep in the backyard under the stars last night. I love doing things like that with her, but I always sleep terribly with the city noises at night. The happy side-effect of my backyard insomnia was that there was a fairly constant stream of migrants flying overhead, especially between 1 and 2am. It’s very challenging birding by ear with very little geographic or habitat context, often with very distant birds calling only once or twice while passing over. The list below is the ones that I could identify with reasonable certainty, but there were many others that I either wasn’t 100% sure on or didn’t even have a clue. It sure makes me wonder how many species fly over our region in the middle of the night never getting within 500m from the ground!

-Common tern (I was very surprised too. They were very clear tern calls from a group of 4 or 5 birds and definitely not Caspians)
-Barn owl
-Wilson’s snipe (Winnowing! I’m used to hearing that at night in the Merritt area, but I’ve never heard it here)
-Common loon
-Pied-billed grebe
-Sora
-Western grebe

[Ben]

That is amazing!

I did a bit of NFC (nocturnal flight call) recording last year with my cell phone and a bucket, but I never got that many species in a night. I don't think that it picked up much... There's a Facebook group where people post about the topic, and ask for help with recordings they need help with.

You can see some recording here: ebird.org/media/catalog?mediaType=Audio&searchField=user&includeUnconfirmed=true&userId=USER1675620®ionCode=&sort=upload_date_desc&taxaLocale=en_US

I'm really jealous of your Common Terns!