Nightjar walks
BODGYNYDD NATURE RESERVE, NORTH WALES The whirring, churring call of these summer visitors fills the evening air with the sound of the sub-Sahara. Julie Brominicks takes a walk on the dark side
Gwydir Forest, North Wales
n one magical moment
a pair skimmed down, silent
weightless spectres in the
half-light, to hover and drink in
a dew pond.”
Richard Mabey Nightjar encounters make you tingle. Perhaps it’s because they are so rare – these summer migrants visit Britain just briefly, to breed. They are endangered; habitat-loss, pesticides and colder wetter springs are the culprits. Nightjars are hidden by day in bracken roosts by their cappuccino plumage. Perhaps it’s because they glide as quietly as owls, flying without a whisper of sound, that you shiver. Crepuscular birds, they are only active in the dark.
OUT OF AFRICA
Or perhaps it’s because they seem to bring with them a hint of Africa. The males’ territorial ‘churring’ call drifts through summer nights like cicadas, or a swamp of tropical frogs. One of their Welsh folk-names alludes to this whirring mechanical croak. It is Aderyn y droell, or ‘spinning-wheel bird’.
Although they are most numerous in southern England, Wales is somewhere you can see nightjars, and Bodgynydd Nature Reserve, high in the Gwydir Forest three miles north-west of Betws-y-Coed, is one such place. The reserve comprises a mosaic of heath, scrub, bracken-covered slopes, clear-fell, mixed woodland, wetland and lakes, and occupies a plateau overlooked by the Snowdonia Mountains. Especially it is Moel Siabod, with its distinctive, almost Fuji-like profile, which dignifies the arena where club moss, royal fern, sundew, butterwort and bladderwort thrive, bats flit and snipe drum.
JUNE TROPICS
Guided nightjar walks take place here every June. Participants gather in late light and walk through forest corridors of warm and cool air, emerging to see the sun setting over the lake. The scent of pines gives way to smells of bog myrtle, wet swamp and dry rock. It is in this dusky arena that nightjars, silently and swiftly, begin their agile spirit-flight, feeding on moths, flies, beetles and crane-flies.
Sitting on a rock still warm from the day, you can sometimes hear the co-ik call of the male to the female, or the slap of wings behind his back. Sometimes you glimpse the white spots on his tail-feathers. But mostly, in this amphitheatre of rock and lake and swamp, on a sultry June night, you listen to the churring sound like spinning-wheels and frogs, think of the tropics, and tingle.