Common Nighthawk

Forests and open woodlands on dry ridges and slopes, often oak or pine.

Open, thin-soil openings and rock on limestone, dolomite or other lime-rich rock, including cedar glades.

Treeless grassy or shrubby summits and ridges in the high mountains.

Steep, sun-baked slopes of loose shale with sparse oaks and Virginia pine and their own endemic wildflowers. Linked only where the source names shale barrens; calcareous shale stays with the limestone glades.

Open sand of beaches, dunes and the hollows between them.

Tidal marshes of the Atlantic and Gulf coasts where the source does not say whether the water is fresh, brackish or salt. A stated salinity files the marsh under freshwater tidal marshes or salt and brackish marshes instead.

Shallow ponds in Coastal Plain depressions, such as limesinks and the ponds in some Carolina bays, that rise and fall with the seasons.

Wet ground taken over by weedy or introduced plants after disturbance, such as common reed, Chinese tallow or tamarisk stands; the upland counterpart is roadsides, fields and disturbed ground.

Forests on low ground beside rivers and streams that flood from time to time.

Forest or woodland where the source does not say how moist or dry.

Open, herb-covered wetlands with fresh, non-tidal water.

Marshes along tidal rivers where the water is fresh but rises and falls with the tide.

Flat, poorly drained uplands and terraces with oaks, sweetgum and sometimes loblolly pine, wet in winter and dry in summer, but neither a floodplain nor a swamp.

Salt-pruned forests and shrub thickets behind coastal dunes.

Forests between dry and moist, often oak-hickory on slopes.

Wet, open, peaty mountain wetlands fed by seepage, often with sphagnum moss.

High mountain forests of beech, yellow birch and sugar maple, including boulderfield forests.

Flat, sandy Coastal Plain pine woodlands, wetter than sandhills and denser than savannas.

Open, fire-kept longleaf pine stands over grasses and wildflowers on wet to moist sandy soil.

Dense evergreen shrub wetlands and bay forests on wet, acid peat of the Coastal Plain.

Still water and its edges: ponds, lakes, millponds and reservoirs.

Coastal marshes flooded by salty or brackish tides.

Places where groundwater keeps the soil or rock wet, such as seepage slopes and spring runs.

Salt and brackish open water of sounds, bays and estuaries, with the mud and sand flats and seagrass beds that tides cover and uncover; the vegetated marsh is salt and brackish marshes.

Planted or intensively managed stands of pine or hardwoods grown for timber; a land use rather than a natural community.

Open, wet, grassy or sedgy ground that is not a bog.