Your Birding Month

Birds to find this month include Dipper, White-tailed Eagle and Wood Sandpiper

The Nightjar is a bird of great mystery. Very few of us know it well. Many of us have never seen or even heard one. They are birds of myth and legend in more ways than one, though the multiple reasons are intertwined. Cryptically patterned and weird in shape and structure, the Nightjar sleeps during the day, only emerging when half-seen in the crepuscular hours. So, it is immediately mysterious and immediately open to flights of fancy among country folk of yore. Even Aristotle referred to the Nightjar’s reputation as a sucker of goats’ teats. And the ‘goatsucker’ legend lived on for centuries, probably entirely owing to the birds being seen feeding on insects associated with livestock at night. They were blamed for causing goats to ‘go dry’ and even, in Britain, for striking down calves with a disease known as Puckeridge. Naturalist Gilbert White was apparently aware in the 18th Century that the ‘fatal distemper’ was caused by a warble fly, and bemoaned the blaming of the innocent bird he referred to as a Fern-owl, Churn-owl, Eve-jar or indeed Puckeridge. The jar and churn parts of the names refer to the amazing ‘reeling’ song of the male Nightjar, a beautiful, almost insect-like tuneful rattle. The Fern-owl was the name still used by the poet John Clare in the 19th Century, as it is a night bird associated with heathy, bracken lands (and the nightjars are in fact quite closely related to the owls). In the 20th Century, Dylan Thomas, in his poem Fern Hill, talked of “All the moon long I heard, blessed among stables, the nightjars flying with the ricks”, in a time when Nightjars were common enough to enter the public consciousness, but the bird’s population decline had already set in. Now, these beautiful, strange hawk-like, swift-like, insect-catching night birds are much declined and localised, but bouncing back, with some 4,600 singing males distributed very patchily across England, Wales and southern Scotland. They are mainly found on heaths or moors or areas of recent clear felling and early regrowth. To see them, head out to a known locality as the sun is setting and be prepared to wait until it is almost too dark to see the birds! Usually, you will hear the distinctive (and lovely) ‘churr’ song of the male before you see anything!