48 OUR BIRD ALLIES. 
ance of the bird during flight is very singular, the 
head seeming to have been amputated, and the neck 
rounded off just in front of the shoulders. 
Although the nightjar is only with us for a few 
months in the year, it nests-—or, rather, lays its eggs 
—during its visit, and remains until its young are 
sufficiently strong to accompany it upon its journey 
south. The eggs, two in number, are always laid 
upon the ground, sometimes in a slight hollow, some- 
times not, but always concealed as far as possible 
beneath a friendly gorse-bush, or a tuft of heather ; 
a frail shelter, but one which is more effective than 
one would think as a protection from the gaze of a 
passing foe. 
THE place occupied by the nightjar after dark is 
filled during the daytime by the various members of 
the-Swallow family, so that during the whole of the 
twenty-four hours either one or the other is incessantly 
at work. 
The general habits of the swallows are so uni- 
versally familiar that they need not be here described, 
but it may be casually mentioned that a mere glance 
at their bodily structure would be sufficient to inform 
an ornithologist previously unacquainted with their 
very existence—did such an one exist—of almost every 
detail of their life-history. For the long, sickle- 
shaped wings and the stiff, closely-set plumage would 
at once show him that they were gifted with great 
powers of flight; the small and feeble limbs would 
point them out as birds which, from their very inca- 
