274 OBSERVATIONS ON BIRDS. 



The least observation and attention would convince men, that 

 these birds neither injure the goatherd nor the grazier, but are 

 perfectly harmless, and subsist alone, being night birds, on night 

 insects, such as scarabcei, and phalance j and through the month 

 of July mostly on the scarabceus solstitialis, which in many 

 districts abounds at that season. Those that we have opened, 

 have always had their craws stuffed with large night moths and 

 their eggs, and pieces of chaffers : nor does it any wise appear 

 how they can, weak and unarmed as they seem, inflict any harm 

 upon kine, unless they possess the powers of animal magnetism, 

 and can affect them by fluttering over them. 



A fern owl, this evening (August 27) showed off in a very un- 

 usual and entertaining manner, by hawking round and round the 

 circumference of my great spreading oak for twenty times fol- 

 lowing, keeping mostly close to the grass, but occasionally 

 glancing up amidst the boughs of the tree. This amusing bird 

 was then in pursuit of a brood of some particular phalaena be- 

 longing to the oak, of which there are several sorts ; and ex- 

 hibited on the occasion a command of wing superior, I think, to 

 that of the swallow itself. 



When a person approaches the haunt of fern-owls in an even- 

 ing, 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 scarabceus melolontha 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 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 



