Bird of the Month: Nightjar John Mcewen

by john mcewen illustrated by carry akroyd

The summer migrant nightjar, Caprimulgis (‘goat sucker’) europaeus, is in the UK most numerous in southern England, especially the New Forest, Dorset and Surrey heathlands and Suffolk’s Thetford Forest.

A revival in its numbers is due partly to felled tracts of commercial conifer forest, which offer a brief resurgence of insectattracting vegetation until replanting.

In its British homeland, many of the heaths it once enjoyed have become airfields. This column’s illustrator, Carry Akroyd, President of the John Clare Society, particuarly regrets the loss of Wittering Heath, near Stamford and ‘Clare country’. For Clare, nightjars were ‘fern owls’: That lonely spot she wakes her jarring noise To the unheeding waste till mottled morn Fills the red east with daylight’s coming sound And the heath’s echoes mock the herding boys From The Fern Owl’s Nest

Carry tells of an attempt to see them in Norfolk: ‘My birder pal Steve Brayshaw and I wandered Kelling Heath one summer night, each following justdiscernible paths towards the intriguing sound of the bird, seemingly from this direction and that. Eventually we returned to my husband waiting patiently by the car who, without knowledge or interest, had seen the strange-sounding bird as it flew close past his head.’

The sound is uttered by a perched male, usually at dawn and dusk, repeated at intervals and sometimes lasting up to 10 minutes. As Thomas Hardy wrote,

The dusk when, like an eyelid’s soundless blink The dewfall-hawk comes crossing the shades to alight Upon the wind-warped upland thorn… From Afterwards

Analysis reveals 1,900 notes a minute. Spinning fishing reels come to mind; ‘Jenny Spinner’ is a nickname. Both sexes hunt for insects, making ‘cuick’ calls. Males also offer trills and wing-clap displays. Its froglike gape is surrounded with bristles to funnel its prey, principally moths. A reflective layer ( tapetum lucidum) beind the retina, which shines in torchlight, sharpens its night sight. Nocturnal mystery has made it heir to every superstition of the dark; its malevolent sucking of milk from goats was first reported by Aristotle. In Yorkshire’s Nidderdale, the ghosts of dead, unbaptised children were believed to enter nightjars.

Approximately 10,000 come to the UK. A geolocator revealed that a bird bred in Thetford Forest took eight weeks to arrive from Congo’s rainforests. Its homeward journey began in February and ended in May.

It is the sound of the nocturnal nightjar that betrays its otherwise extreme secrecy. BB reckoned them the best camouflaged of any bird, their greys and browns blending with a branch on which they, alone among birds, sit lengthwise. As I drove along a deserted sunlit road in Ayrshire hill country, what appeared to be a stick sprang into hawklike life and away, with a glimpse of white on wings and tail. The arrival of motoring has meant that sunbathing on roads sometimes proves a nightjar’s downfall.