THE NIGHTJAR :u., 



THE NIGHTJAR 

 [F. B. KIRKMAN] 



To the superstitious the nightjar used to be an object of awe and 

 dread. Perhaps he still is, and small wonder. His love of the dusk, 

 his swift noiseless flight and mystic circles in the twilight, his eerie 

 song uttered beneath the moon from the topmost twig of some dark 

 solitary pine, the strange flattened head to which the bird owes the 

 unlovely name of flying-toad, the still stranger, almost reptilian mark- 

 ings of his plumage, which serve to render him invisible even when 

 crouching on the open ground in the broad light of day, all this has 

 made him seem unearthly, an embodied spirit of the dark, a thing 

 of evil 



His reputed misdeeds have given him some of the names he still 

 bears. He it was who came like a thief in the night and robbed 

 cows and goats of their milk ; hence his Latin name of capriimtlgus, 

 the goat-sucker. He inflicted upon cattle a fatal disease known by 

 the singular name of puckeridge. It was given him to mark his 

 guilt He was the nighthawk, also the fern-owl. To call him hawk 

 or owl was in later more modern times a sentence of death. Fortun- 

 ately, like the owls, he has survived his evil reputation. The conquest 

 of fact over fiction and superstition has made it clear that he is one 

 of the best of man's bird friends. He is wholly innoxious, 1 and the 

 actual benefit he confers in destroying injurious insects is difficult 

 to overestimate ; for it must be remembered that the great majority 

 of insect-feeding birds hunt by day the nightjar hum- after 

 sunset 



Though the nightjar occasionally picks its food from the ground, 



1 R. Newitead, Food of tome British Bird*, p. IB. Board of Agriculture. 



