CLOSE ENCOUNTERS IN THE TWILIGHT ZONE

The crepuscular nightjar seems to inhabit another universe, on the edge of ours. Neil Ansell spends a night in the New Forest, hoping to spot the elusive bird

A wild night out in the New Forest in search of a very elusive bird

To be alone in the woods at night is sometimes thought to be intimidating. We may flinch at the cracking of a twig in the shadows, worry that we are being watched by unseen eyes. But, for whatever reason, I never feel like that; I find the forest by night to be comforting. My intention is not to stay in the darkest depths of the wood, but to position myself at its edge, the interface where one habitat meets another, where I hope there is more to be seen. Where the wood meets the heath, there is a fine scattering of Scots pines that have self-seeded and are slowly creeping out into the heather. I find a perfect spot; almost level and nestled between a group of five trees that have grown close together. There is no obvious route between the trees, and my biggest worry is getting trampled by cattle as they bumble about in the dark. I lay out my sleeping bag; from here I have a perfect view into the woods, out onto the heath, and up to a circle of sky framed by branches.

My sleeping spot falls into shadow, and then a dark band slowly creeps up the trunks of the trees as the sun sinks in the sky. I am on the eastern flank of Cooper’s Hill, so will not be able to see the sun setting from here. I decide to stroll up the hillside for a longer view. As I climb, I find that I have to circumnavigate a pair of bomb craters, almost hidden now among the heather – a trap for the unwary. In a band of gorse, I get a final perfect view of a fuzzacker [Dartford warbler] skipping from bush to bush. My best view of the day as well as my last. I lost count at some point earlier on, but it must be well over ten I’ve seen. Through the thick heather ahead of me, I see what looks like a pair of sticks bouncing along the ridge line, silhouetted against the reddening sky.

Where there is a break in the heather, a roe buck turns to look at me almost indifferently, a handsome fellow with his big black nose and small fine antlers. As the sun approaches the horizon, it passes behind a distant bank of low cloud. I shall not get the full sunset effect after all. Perhaps it is a good thing; I need to get back down the hill while it is still light enough to see. I don’t want to stumble into a crater in the dark.

PATIENCE PAYS OFF

I lie down on my back beneath the pine trees and wait. The ground is a soft enough mix of pine needles and grass, the weather is still and dry and mild, and there seem to be no biting insects to trouble me. I could not have asked for better conditions for a night out under the stars. I don’t have long to wait; almost immediately what I’d hoped to see appears right above my head at treetop height. Long sharp wings and a long, long tail, twisting and turning, spinning in circles, darting from side to side with astonishing grace, chasing moths.

It is an almost mythical creature – the nightjar, the fern owl, the goatsucker, the nighthawk. I am inordinately pleased, aware that I have left it late in the season to look for one.

In a week or two, they will all be gone.

I have had no advice on where exactly to look for one;

I have chosen this spot by intuition alone. It just felt right. And it is such a great view, for the light is barely beginning to fade, and the bird is so close, as if it has come to watch over me. It

is unusual for a nightjar to put in an appearance until half an hour after sunset. I check the time; it is the precise minute of sunset.

These birds are more often heard than seen. They have an alien song, a mechanical churring that rises and falls, that is far carrying and almost impossible to locate. Although personally I can never place any sound, as I only have one functioning ear. I never had the good fortune to see a nightjar here as a child, though I have seen them since, most recently when I was in Africa. I was hitchhiking at night along a dirt road in the Kalahari Desert in Botswana, and they were swooping in and out of the darkness as they hoovered up the moths drawn to the beam of the car headlights. There are two or three other species of nightjar in Africa, but the ones I saw could well have been our own European variety, for they overwinter in sub-saharan Africa.

Though I didn’t get to see one as a child, I am reminded of one night in the forest when I was 12. I left my campsite at dusk and climbed into a high seat – a wooden platform in the trees used for culling deer – that overlooked a little clearing, and watched a woodcock roding. It circled the clearing over and over with its strange moth-like flight, calling repeatedly, a frog-like croak followed by a high-pitched chirrup. I watched until the light failed, and the roe deer began to slip out of the cover of the trees. All the crepuscular birds – the birds of the half-light – have a strange mystique about them. Seeing them is like peering through a curtain and glimpsing an unseen world that runs in parallel to our own.

A RARE SIGHT

There are species of nightjar on every continent save for Antarctica, and they are one of the least known and most elusive of all families of birds. There are three species – from the Chinese desert, from the Congo Basin and from French Guiana – that are known from only a single specimen. And, notoriously, there is one species that is known from even less than a single specimen; one left wing, to be precise, which is all that could be salvaged from a roadkill bird found on the Nechisar Plain in central Ethiopia.

I hear no song. The bird I have been watching is a female, and the song is reserved for the male. It is light enough to see that she does not have the distinctive white wing patches of the male. I strain to hear if there is a more distant singing bird, but there is nothing. Perhaps it is too late in the season for song or perhaps her mate has already left. After a while, she swoops elegantly away over the trees and is lost to view. Such a perfect sighting of such an extraordinary creature; it makes me feel emotional, like falling in love. Whatever the future brings, I will always have this moment. I am easily pleased.

It seems that the moment is over, but five minutes later she is back again, right above my head, and this becomes a pattern for the next half-hour. Every five minutes, almost to the dot, she comes back. It is as if she is watching over me, examining this inexplicable intrusion into her terrain, or perhaps it is just that she has a regular circuit, like the roding woodcocks of long ago. Darkness begins to fall. There is the merest sliver of a crescent moon. The stars come out, one by one, and the bats begin to circle around me, unidentifiable in the darkness.

Just as I am beginning to think it will soon be too dark to see the nightjar again, I hear a gentle call – coo-ic, coo-ic – not the song but the flight call. She’s back. And here she is, a shadow dancing over me. I watch until I can see nothing, then close my eyes and fall asleep with a smile on my face.

EXTRACTED FROM The Circling Sky by Neil Ansell (Tinder Press, £18.99).