BIRDS IN GENERAL 417 



When a person approaches the haunt of fern owls in an 

 evening, they continue flying round the head of the 

 obtruder ; and by striking their wings together above 

 their backs, in the manner that the pigeons called smiters 

 are known to do, make 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 scarabaeus 

 melontha on the oak ; and the scarabaeus solstitialis at mid- 

 summer. 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 eve-jarr, 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 



