OF NATURE. 441 



a smart snap : perhaps at that time they are jealous for their 

 young ; and their noise and gesture are intended by way of 

 menace. 



Fern-owls have attachment to oaks, no doubt on account of 

 food ; for the next evening we saw one again several times 

 among the boughs of the same tree ; but it did not skim 

 round its stem over the grass, as on the evening before. In 

 May these birds find the scarabceus melontha on the oak ; and 

 the scarabceus solstitialis at midsummer. These peculiar birds 

 can only be watched and observed for two hours in the twenty- 

 four : and then in a dubious twilight an hour after sun-set 

 and an hour before sun-rise. 



On this day (July 14, 1789) a woman brought me two 

 eggs of a fern-owl or evejarr, which she found on the verge 

 of the Hanger, to the left of the hermitage under a beechen 

 shrub. This person, who lives just at the foot of the Hanger, 

 seems well acquainted with these nocturnal swallows, and says 

 she has often found their eggs near that place, and that they 

 lay only two at a time on the bare ground. The eggs were 

 oblong, dusky, and streaked somewhat in the manner of the 

 plumage of the parent bird, and were equal in size at each 

 end. The dam was sitting on the eggs when found, which 

 contained the rudiments of young, and would have been 

 hatched perhaps in a week. From hence we may see the 

 time of their breeding, which corresponds pretty well with 

 that of the swift, as does also the period of their arrival. Each 

 species is usually seen about the beginning of May. Each 

 breeds but once in a summer ; each lays only two eggs. 



July 4, 1790. The woman who brought me two fern-owl's 

 eggs last year on July 14, on this day produced me two more, 

 one of which had been laid this morning, as appears plainly, 

 because there was only one in the nest the evening before. 

 They were found, as last July, on the verge of the down above 

 the hermitage under a beechen shrub, on the naked ground. 

 Last year those eggs were full of young, and just ready to be 

 hatched. 



These circumstances point out the exact time when these 

 curious nocturnal migratory birds lay their eggs and hatch 



