CAPRIMULGUS EUROP^US. 219 



is not sharp-sighted by day, hut it sees at night." ^Elion says 

 — " Sucking the goat makes the teat dry or blind, and so the 

 flow of milk is stopped," and that " it is fearless of the 

 vengeance of the goat-herds." Pliny also states that the goat- 

 suckers " are nocturnate thieves, for they cannot see by day. 

 They enter the folds, and fly to the udders of the goat to suck 

 the milk, from which the udder dies away, and blindness falls 

 upon the goats." Thus were harmless and useful birds perse- 

 cuted by the ancients, and called thieves, as modern game- 

 keepers shoot down useful owls and kestrels, and call them 

 vermin. Even up to the end of last century White of Selborne 

 says — " The country people have a notion that the fern owl or 

 churn-owl — which they call a puckeridge — is injurious to wean- 

 ing calves by inflicting, as it strikes them, the fatal distemper 

 known by the name of " puckeridge ;" but the malady is caused 

 by the oestrus bevis — a diperous insect which lays its eggs along 

 the chines of kine, where the maggots, when hatched, eat their 

 way through the hide into the flesh, and grow to a very large 

 size; and the poor goatsucker, instead of striking the beast 

 with distemper, may be doing its best to kill the insect that 

 causes it. Thus has the harmless bird, through ignorance, been 

 persecuted under a double imputation in Italy of sucking the 

 teats of goats, hence called caprimulgus ; and with us of giving 

 a deadly distemper to cattle. 



It was also, like the swallows, erroneously thought to fly 

 with its mouth open in pursuit of its prey, which the long 

 movable bristles of its upper mandible gave rise to. The 

 flight of this bird, when in pursuit of beetles or moths, is rapid, 

 with quick evolutions, and more buoyant than the swallows. I 

 think Mr Selby in error when saying " it flies with its capacious 

 mouth fully extended, and as the bristles lining the upper 

 mandible diverge or contract by muscles attached to their roots, 

 they greatly assist in the capture of its prey," because were a 

 bird with so wide a mouth to fly with such velocity as it does, 

 its gullet and stomach would be chokingly filled with air, as its 

 pharynx has no particular apparatus for excluding it. The 

 notion of its seeing through the thin, transparent membrane 

 that lines the mouth is even more preposterous, as its eyes are 

 fixed in their orbits like the owl's, and cannot move in their 

 sockets. 



It is chiefly found in furzy commons and moors and hilly 

 ground covered with ferns. Fifty years ago it used to frequent 

 Priorsmuir, Kinglassie, and Tentsmuir, but I have not got 



