An excellent blog post with this title by The Roaming Ecologist can be found here.
Since our small towns in the Western Corn Belt have become oases for many species, it’s unfortunate that here in Vermillion, city code considers prairie species like milkweed and sunflowers to be a nuisance and grass length must be kept under 6 inches.
There's this thing that nighthawk researchers encounter. People don't know what a nighthawk is. Confusion about nightjar naming conventions is nothing new.
In fact, nightjars are often called goat suckers, presumably because people feared they were feeding from their livestock at night. The irony is that nightjars are insectivores and were likely feeding from the insects attracted to their goats, providing an ecosystem service.
Sometimes it's because they have another name for this bird. Here's an anecdote from a fellow researcher:
"I once ran into an old moonshiner while netting bats in West Virginia, and he told me this long story about the bullbats coming through in huge flocks in fall. It took me about 15 minutes to figure out what the heck he was talking about (in fairness, probably most of that was due to his West Virginia moonshiner accent). He was adamant they were really bats." – JB
Bullbats, in case you didn't know, are another name for nighthawks. They have many names. Here's a list, courtesy of Idaho Fish and Game:
"The Rolling Rock story of the Blackfoot explains why the Common Nighthawk (
Chordeiles minor
), referred to in the story as a bullbat, has such a small beak and sizeable mouth. It is said that Napi was cold so he borrowed a robe from a large rock but would not return it. The rock got angry and began to chase Napi, so he called the nighthawks for help. After the birds destroyed the rock that was rolling in his pursuit, Napi rewarded the nighthawks by pulling their mouths wide and pinching off their beaks so that they were "pretty and queer looking" (Grinnell 1913: 166-167). In another version of the story, Old Man asked the nighthawks for help, but subsequently changed his mind and accused the birds of spoiling his fun by destroying the rolling rock. He punished them by tearing off their bills and splitting their mouths open wide, accounting for their appearance today (Wissler and Duvall 1908: 24-25). The nighthawks later retaliated by defecating on Old Man as they flew over his head. Today, Blackfoot elders ascribe great significance to archaeological sites where Common Nighthawks nest."
From
The Winged: An Upper Missouri River Ethno-ornithology
(K Chandler, WF Murray, MN Zedeño, R James… – 2017)
After five years, 85 nests and more than a thousand point counts, I had my last day in the field yesterday with nighthawks. It’s been a wonderful experience. I know that wherever I end up next, it will never be like this. 
To see a video of a nighthawk and her chick, click here.
Earlier this year, President Trump ordered a gag order for Department of Interior and Environmental Protection Agency employees, and the result was remarkable. Fearing that public information about contaminants and climate change would be removed from their web sites, EPA began migrating their data to outside web sites that archivists and coders created. National Park Service employees moved their outreach efforts on climate change to rogue Twitter pages. Thus, like with Elizabeth Warren, persistence can happen, nevertheless.
This has been a tumultuous year politically, what with conservation funding up in the air and the encroaching effects of the Anthropocene I’ve mentioned here, here, here , here, here and here. And yet, there is hope.
Leave it to the considerable efforts of the Nature Conservancy to find the silver lining in these 12 conservation-oriented stories of progress.
A Feathered Reptile 